Star Wars - the Ballet!

[animate_mush]

Yesterday, in conjunction with pre-birthday celebrations, we went to see Star Wars - the Ballet! It turns out that this was the final concert for a local ballet school (which is presumably why it received so little publicity) and was 45 minutes of home-brew choreography for children of all ages against the classic John Williams score

Comments

[cabbitjakie]

Wow. That is very special.

[animate_mush]

It was extremely special. But also a lot of good fun!

[sedesdraconis]

a bunch of three year olds haphazardly moving around and being, well, three-year olds in a dance class is perceputally indistinguishable from a group of perfectly acted and interpreted Ewoks.

Ha! Awesome.

[animate_mush]

It was! It was actually quite awesome!

On another note - do you know of cases in nature where the female of the species is venemous and the male is not? Or perhaps where the female is more venemous than the male?

[sedesdraconis]

I know male black widows aren't very venomous (partly just cause they're a lot smaller, and have smaller toxin reservoirs).

It's not something I've ever tracked, but I suspect that may be true of many spiders, given the general patterns of sexual dimorphism in spiders (females are bigger and, behaviourly, have more use for venom than males in many spiders).

In bees and wasps, venom is delivered by the ovipositor, which males don't have, so the males (usually/always?) aren't venomous.

I can't think of any vertebrates that are likely candidates to check, but I also wouldn't be surprised if there turned out to be some. Poison is a good risk-aversion tool, which is often more useful in females.

[animate_mush]

Thanks! I have sort of a weird reason for asking.

In Doctor Who, one of the recurring adversaries are these groups of anthropomorphic reptiles who put themselves into hibernation to avoid a prehistoric catastrophe - imminant collision with a small planet (now the Moon). The most recent episode in which they appeared we saw a female warrior caste. And this led to the inevitable question: what does a reptile need with mammary glands? And someone proposed that they're not mammary glands - they're venom sacks (since one of them stung someone with a long prehensile tongue - don't ask - earlier in the episode). And this, of course, only makes sense (for a given value of "makes sense") if the females are significantly more venomous than the males - which sounded plausible to me, but I figured you would know if anyone would.