Human relationships aren’t complicated
Originally published at Ted the Penguin. Please leave any comments there.
Never again will I think that human relationships are complicated.
Symbion is a tiny animal about half a millimetre long, shaped like a bulbous tube with a ring of tiny hairs - cilia - at one end. They live on the hairy mouthparts of Norway lobsters, with tens or even hundreds per lobster. They feed on bits of leftover food and seem to be harmless to their hosts.
Ok, fair enough. Strange, but such is life. So what’s so labyrinthine about them?
Things start to get complicated when you consider their life cycle. Let’s start with a feeding animal living on a lobster’s mouthparts: this individual - it’s hard to assign a sex - can then produce one of three kinds of offspring: a “Pandora” larva, a “Prometheus” larva or a female.
Wait, what?
The Pandora larva develops into another feeding adult - a straightforward case of asexual reproduction. By contrast, the female remains inside the adult and awaits a male - but, attentive readers will be crying, what male?
Not sure about crying, but I’ll bite. What male?
The answer lies in the Prometheus larva. This attaches itself to another feeding adult, then produces two or three males from within itself. These dwarf males, which are even more internally complex than the other stages, seek out the females and fertilize them - though the details are unknown.
It produces males from within itself? Who’s sole purpose is to find women and have sex with them?
Once the female has been fertilized, she leaves the adult’s body and hunkers down in a sheltered region of the lobster’s mouth-parts. Her body, no longer needed, turns into a hard cyst. Inside this, a fertilized egg develops into yet another stage: the chordoid larva.
In due course this larva hatches and swims off to colonize another lobster. Once it has attached itself to one, it develops into another adult and the cycle begins again.
Of course, now that I think about it, I think I saw that about 10 years ago on Jerry Springer.
Yep. Definitely saw that on daytime TV.