Male octopus injects female with venom during sex to avoid being eaten

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2471120-male-octopus-injects-female-with-venom-during-sex-to-avoid-being-eaten/

by delichon • 1 year ago

93 89 1 year ago

kennysoona2• 1 year ago

It's just how they make sex more interesting. Most only live a year or two, and you only live once.

bell-cot2• 1 year ago

Note to self: Be sure to die with a sufficiently well-buffed Karma to avoid rebirth as a member of Hapalochlaena fasciata.

okokwhatever• 1 year ago

Funniest joke ever in YN

mrlonglong2• 1 year ago

The alien in the TV series the resident alien is descended from octopii.

asveikau3• 1 year ago

The plural of octopus is octopuses.

But if you want to sound more latin, octopus is a third declension noun, and those have nominative plurals that tend to end in -es, rather than the second declension which ends in -us for singular or -i for plural. Third declension nouns whose nominative form ends in -s also tend to change their root's final consonant when you change the suffix. (Eg. opus -> opera. That one doesn't end in -es because it's neuter.)

All this to say, the latin plural of octopus is octopodes.

metalman• 1 year ago

VS, octapie, which is what the females are dreaming of, instead of getting envenomated

lively bunch, reclusive, come in all sizes, from extra tiny, to back off quick, and a whole other complex octapoid lifestyle

I regularly interact with spiders, wolf spiders bieng my favorites by far, sometimes called jumping spiders, they are sight hunters and dont build webs, and seem to stay in a certain teritory for days or weeks, before moving on

AngryData• 1 year ago

Yeah sure but we don't speak latin, English is a hodgepodge of a dozen other languages, both dead and alive, and the only value that determines whether something is correct in english or not is common usage. And octopi is used often enough to not really be incorrect. You might as well be complaining that "ain't" isn't a word despite it clearly being so ever since Dickens used it.

tricot• 1 year ago

Why would he try to sound more latin when the word octopus does come from ancient greek? I think that's the cause for this common error. People assuming a word is latin just because it ends in '-us'.

traceroute66• 1 year ago

Portia labiata spiders are also fun:

"Females try to kill and eat their mates during or after copulation, while males use tactics to survive copulation, but sometimes females outwit them."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_labiata

amelius4• 1 year ago

The conspicuous main eyes provide vision more acute than a cat's during the day

Curious how the spider processes all this information with their tiny brain ...

diamondfist25• 1 year ago

Tiny brain with 8 eyes…

undebuggable• 1 year ago

I was always wondering if brains all these spiders and flies have the capability to reconstruct the surroundings in 3D like mammals do, or their sophisticated eyes are only light and motions sensors. Observing e.g. fly evading flyswatter which resembles random walk, it's likely the latter.

GolfPopper• 1 year ago

SF author (and marine biologist) Peter Watts as a great little overview of Portia's "thought process" along with links to some more in-depth articles: https://rifters.com/real/2009/01/iterating-towards-bethlehem...

Apocryphon• 1 year ago

Why is it eight-legged creatures doing this what’s going on

bproven2• 1 year ago

also check out the book Children of Time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Time_(novel)). Reading it now (not sure how I missed it originally), pretty good evolutionary world building based on this species :)

FlyingSnake• 1 year ago

Children of time is such a great work of fiction. It was strange for me to root for spiders over humans

skc• 1 year ago

A book that has pride of place on my shelf. I found myself speed-reading through the drama surrounding the human beings so I could slowly savour the progress of the spider civilization.

A truly wonderful work of sci-fi

swayvil• 1 year ago

I thought everybody did this.

HenryBemis• 1 year ago

If you mean that forced sex/rape is prevalent in nature, then yes, there are many species that use this method/approach. If you want to make humor about rape, I'll refer you to what Ricky Gervais said on the matter (look it up).

wizzwizz4• 1 year ago

I can't find what Ricky Gervais said on the subject (which I imagine was recent), only news articles about an Edinburgh show he did in 2009. (We're off-topic, but) I'd appreciate a link or quotation.

microtherion• 1 year ago

Talk about "toxic masculinity"…

yubblegum• 1 year ago

More like a solid prenup, hey?

bladeee• 1 year ago

Venomous masculinity

lelandfe• 1 year ago

Venomous Femininity is a good tongue twister and a solid trivia team name

giardini• 1 year ago

As opposed to "lethal femininity", which is what the male octopus gets if he doesn't disable the female?

hn_throwaway_99• 1 year ago

Well, when you're going up against "cannibalistic femininity", it seems less toxic...

amelius4• 1 year ago

I wonder how human society would evolve if this were the case for us.

slowtrek• 1 year ago

It's not worth wondering. A core tenant of evolution is that it's a random mutation, and that some random mutation is favorable. It's very Life of Pi, you have to make your own truth out of this because it won't make sense.

somenameforme3• 1 year ago

We'd go extinct. Spiders can have hundreds of offspring per 'birth.' Humans have, on average, about one. You need each woman to have at least 2 children for populations to stay the same. Which, in this case would mean you'd need at least 2 men.

An evolution (or artificial 'population management') where males are 66% likely or otherwise born at a 2:1 ratio wouldn't work because then you need each woman to have 3 children to create a sustainable population, meaning you need an even higher ratio of males - and so on recursively towards infinite male:female ratios.

amelius4• 1 year ago

I mean, it all depends on what you want to assume. You can assume that a woman in this case will have more offspring, and continue reasoning from there.

mrfinn• 1 year ago

If? never been married, right? PS. You may think of your credit card as your "venom", so you won't get eat alive in a divorce process lol

throw7383839• 1 year ago

You mean if a woman could destroy a man for (not) having sex? Men would avoid sex, cohabitation, marriage and families. For society it would mean less babies, demographic and economical decline.

aurizon• 1 year ago

In Russia, China, Japan and many other countries, women are choosing sex with birth control as well as zero sex = forced demographic decline. China just purchased 300,000 fertile young women from North Korea - I wonder if they are allowed birth control or if this is a domestic forced breeding experiment?

seec3• 1 year ago

Yep, exactly what is happening in rich countries at the moment. The human female behavior is much closer to other species than we like to pretend. Because we got too arrogant with our "smartness".

seec3• 1 year ago

No need to wonder, you can already observe the results going on at the moment.

Women don't do outright cannibalism since humans are more sophisticated, but women absolutely kill (figuratively) their mate/husband to extract as much ressource as possible (regardless of them having offspring in needs or not).

They are biologically programmed for that, but we forgot about it and/or we like to pretend this is not happening.

Reality doesn't care much about feeling, and with little countermeasures afforded to the men, birthrate has been going down tremendously in every country where women power has been unmatched.

So, the answer is actually pretty simple: it will die down until the only ones left are the males that found a new "venom" and are willing to use it.

hombre_fatal2• 1 year ago

So, fertility rates are dropping because men are scared of women extracting resources from them?

Too much Andrew Tate?

tim3332• 1 year ago

From personal observation I don't think it's worries about the wife getting the house that are stopping people having kids. I think there's more of an issue with the current system encouraging everyone to get high paying jobs and the cost of housing, education and so on getting bit up by those making life hard for anyone who doesn't play along with that system, and hard for anyone who has kids.

aucisson_masque• 1 year ago

how does female cannibalizing the male fit into darwin evolution theory ?

that evolution should make reproducing less efficient, either the male is dead before he finish reproducing with the female or at least, he is not able to reproduce with other females.

Yet it seems to be working just fine with other species of octopuses where the male get eaten.

amelius4• 1 year ago

Maybe the female can use the proteins for her offspring, and there are more offspring to offset the lost male.

RajT88• 1 year ago

Presumably the female acquires calories with which to grow her brood.

"Unable to reproduce with other females" is probably relevant. The relative size of different genders has a lot to do with if a species is polygamous or monogamous. Larger males the former and larger females the latter.

HarHarVeryFunny2• 1 year ago

Yes, although the fact that the male has evolved this venomous defense seems to indicate that benefit of maintaining diversity in the gene pool (maybe good genes even, if he had to compete to mate) might outweigh the benefit of being a quick snack for a post-coital hungry female.

sebzim4500• 1 year ago

The effect of natural selection is that the genes that propagate most are the ones that maximize the probability of that gene appearing future generations. There is no direct evolutionary pressure for an individual to behave in ways that benefit the species in general.

lolinder3• 1 year ago

Yes, because there is no concept of "species" in nature, species is an arbitrary grouping we humans apply to the individuals and genetic lines that are actually involved in natural selection.

The female's genes are most likely to get passed down many generations if the males she mates with have genes that enable her male children to survive long enough to reproduce. Once a species gets into a state where females make a habit of eating the males during copulation, it can't readily evolve out of that state, because a female that is less aggressive will mate with males who can't succeed at mating with other females, leading to that line dying out. Sexual cannibalism is a local maximum.

So if at any point in the past there were evolutionary pressure that made cannibalism beneficial to the genes, we would expect to see it stick around until there's sufficient pressure against cannibalism to allow selection away from that local maximum.

svnt• 1 year ago

Eggs are way more resource-intensive than sperm. The female octopus will take care of the eggs and protect them, and then die after they hatch.

Both parents are all-in, probably because some less malleable trait or characteristic, whether environmental or hereditary, requires them to be so.

bell-cot2• 1 year ago

Both parents are all-in...

THIS. The life expectancy of an octopus is extremely low - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus#Lifespan - and they're all-in on the "extreme number of offspring, microscopic survival rate" strategy. So for a male - it's a fairly reasonable tactic to end up as a big, nourishing meal for the female that will go all-in on producing the eggs of your decedents.

andirk2• 1 year ago

With preying mantis and black widow it seemed, as their names suggest, very common for the female to eat the male after being boinked. However, it turns out that in the lab setting with a small closed environment, probably lots of lights and weird sounds, the female was freaked out, which led to her getting the first meal she could find, that being the male. In the wild, it does happen but as a last resort if food is scarce.

The orb spider figured out a hack: he ejects his member in to her after sex which keeps inseminating her from that point forward. Sure he dies, but he reproduces from beyond the grave!

Imustaskforhelp• 1 year ago

Isn't the orb spider really inefficient?

What if one specific mutation of orb spider is really nice but he was killed and its "member" is in a single female orb spider limiting the greatness of a good mutation I suppose which can feel counter to evolution to me I suppose.

paulddraper2• 1 year ago

Cannibalism is legitimate in the wild.

However, as you suggest it’s not necessarily a mating thing.

If the animal is hungry and there is a food source (and no reason to do anything else), the pro-survival option is chosen.

thaumasiotes3• 1 year ago

With preying mantis and black widow it seemed, as their names suggest

The praying mantis is named after its characteristic posture while standing around.

There is no preying mantis.

paulddraper2• 1 year ago

Game theory.

The female benefits from a meal.

The male benefits via procreation.

A different choice by either party would be suboptimal.

sircastor• 1 year ago

It's important to say that evolution isn't versioned, and what we're observing isn't finished. We may be looking at an evolutionary dead-end. Which is to say that if eating the male is an evolutionary development, it might a poor one.

There is no logic to evolution. No decisions are being made. Evolution is reactive, and the surviving lineages may only be responding effectively to some of the external forces. Evolution doesn't happen at a species level, it happens at the individual level and has downstream effects on the species.

We're seeing evolution in action. Tragically, we (individually) won't be around long enough to observe the changes in another 100 or 200 or 1000 generations.

saghm• 1 year ago

either the male is dead before he finish reproducing with the female or at least, he is not able to reproduce with other females

In addition to the sibling comment's caveats, it's worth mentioning that the latter might actually be an advantage? If the male is able to continue reproducing with an unbounded number of females, and the females are limited by how often they can lay eggs (or how quickly they can after copulation), a mutation that causes females to prevent males from reproducing with other females could potentially drown out the ability of females without those mutations to reproduce (e.g. if those females were able to copulate with most males first, they'd be the only ones to produce offspring, and there could even be other adaptions or mutations that aid them in the "first to copulate" race).

littlestymaar• 1 year ago

Go read The selfish gene, these things are being discussed in depth in the chapter “The war between sexes”.

bdangubic• 1 year ago

saw an episode of dateline like this - but humans :)

riidom• 1 year ago

https://archive.is/OO99Q

bitbasher• 1 year ago

This sounds incredibly illegal.

tim3332• 1 year ago

We need to extend the legal system to the animal kingdom! There are millions of bacteria getting away with things.

stevenfoster• 1 year ago

Disappointed that the author of the article has a German name but didn’t coin a long single German word for this.

rbanffy• 1 year ago

I guess becoming venonmous is evolutionarily easier than becoming better lovers.

thaumasiotes3• 1 year ago

The female protects the eggs on her own and then invariably dies, so there's not a lot of reason to invest in a relationship.

AraceliHarker• 1 year ago

In human terms, is this male octopus behavior comparable to drugging someone and then raping her?

catlikesshrimp• 1 year ago

You are thinking Sharks. They may even eat the female by accident.

For this octopus, it is more like making a prenuptial agreement, or gifting assets to family, or a public limited company.

SoftTalker• 1 year ago

No. There's no concept of rape among animals.

Male octopus injects female with venom during sex to avoid being eaten

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