Ocean Creatures' Sex Lives Are More Than A Little Weird

Have you ever thought about fish having sex? Neither have I. Apparently we have been missing out on some incredible information. It turns out that sea creatures are inventive and determined and sometimes positively weird in the reproductive practices. There are enough fascinating facts about fish fornication to fill a book. And now there is one. I am joined by the author of sex in DC. Our intimate connection with sex changing fish, romantic lobsters, kinky squid and other salty erotica of the deep. Welcome to the program. You started to think about this when you were doing doctoral research at Scripps. What got you interested in the topic? I had been doing my graduate work in the Caribbean studying human impacts on coral reefs. Unfortunately, corals are a pretty threatened environment right now. I was seeing a lot of reefs in trouble. This was back in 2001 through 2006. There wasn't a lot of news getting out there into the public about the trouble that these corals were facing. I was actually at a cocktail party one night and I was talking to some friends and we were bemoaning the differences between men and women and how our two sexes have trouble understanding each other. Someone made the comment they wish that they could just be a guy for a day, one of the women said I wish I could be a guy and be in their head and know what was going on. I being the nerdy Marine biologist said yes if only we were parrotfish. The conversation starter -- the conversation sort of stopped. Parrotfish start their life as females and then they transitioned to males so they know what it's like. Later that night I overheard someone telling someone else, did you know that fish change sex? Is in that weird? And then it hit me over the head and I thought oh, that is it. I can get people to read a book about ocean life if I can talk about all of these weird sex lives. Nature has written the stories for us. Sex and sustainability go quite hand-in-hand. Without successful sex we will not have the next-generation whether it is corals, fish, or whales. One of your chapters is called the [ NULL ] chapter . Give us a sample. What is really neat is in the ocean there are so many different kinds of animals. Fish are one. The really cool penises pop-up in sharks for example. Sharks are doubly endowed. Sharks are born with two they are an extension of their pelvic fans which are right before the base of the tail. They are like long cigars or burritos that are a rolled up part of the fin. What is really neat is that the opening unlike a mammal [ NULL ] where there is a tube that connects the part where the sperm is produced all the way through to the end, for us there is a tube that will take the sperm down. In sharks, the sperm comes up at the base and they have invented, nature has invented for them a very cool waterpowered squirt gun technique for their ejaculation. They have these big internal water socks that they can suck water into a poor and then they can squeeze muscle and it shoots a very fine and high-powered stream of water that connects with where the sperm comes out. It can shoot the sperm into the female. It's a hydro-powered ejaculation that you don't see in any other kind of animals. All sharks and rays can do this which is pretty cool Female sea creatures have amazing abilities. Tell us about the creatures who are able to store sperm. Sharks are another example of that. Females have little compartments near their uterus where the sperm can be stored from different males for really long periods of time. We first started to figure this out with sharks that were kept in aquaria where the females have been isolated from males for three or four years and all of a sudden they get pregnant. What is even more cool is we have learned just recently that we actually have to be careful because some of these pregnant females are drawing on sperm stores better almost 4 years old. Other females are reproducing without any mail in Clement whatsoever. They are having virgin births. It's a really cool technique that sharks have been shown, a number of species can do when they can't find a mate. They just go off and do it themselves. There is a female ocean worm that has the male of the species living inside her. This is the deep-sea worm. It was discovered by a research team from Scripps. They found that these firms -- warm slip off of the bones of whales. When they first found these worms the females are the length of your finger. They are thin and long and you can see them with the naked eye. All of the worms they found were females. For a long time the researchers could not figure out where the males were. The females were packed full of sperm and producing fertilized egg so they knew the males had to be somewhere. One day they dove in a little bit deeper with the microscope and kept going further and further and he finally realized that these tiny little microscopic dots that they thought were sperm were actually the males. These females can't -- keep harems of males packed inside and the males are collected from the water and basically stunted juveniles that spurred sperm through the tops of their head. As soon as the sperm runs out they die and then the female worm just collects more. The size difference can be I think one of the biggest on the planet. The females can be 100,000 times bigger than the males. To what do you attribute this incredible diversity of sexual practices among sea creatures? Six first started in the sea. Life has been practicing and innovating there for the longest time. We see so many different kinds of animals in the ocean, much more than on land in terms of large levels of diversity. Those are the starfish and the sea cucumbers. You have groups of forms that only exist there. You have these body types that are totally different. That allows for a lot of innovation in different ways in which you can get sperm to connect with egg. You also have the water. You are in a 3-D environment where gravity doesn't press down upon you in the same way. You also can't use gravity in the same way. Animals have to come up with variable positions in different techniques in order to find one another and in order to seduce one another and certainly in order to seal the deal, if you will. Besides giving readers a Norma's fascination, is there a bigger reason you have for writing this book? It was fun to write the book but there was a purpose. Sex and sustainability go hand-in-hand. The oceans today are in trouble and facing a lot of threats. We are seeing a lot of declines in ocean ecosystems. In order for us to be able to benefit from the a Norma's abundance of food and the oxygen that we breeze, over half comes from the ocean, the shoreline stability and project -- protection that coral reefs and oyster Reese provide, it depends upon everyone being able to produce the next generation. To do that they need to have successful reproduction without really realizing it. Human activities have been disrupting the successful sex in the sea for decades. Whether it's from fishing or pollutants or disrupting the behaviors by being present . She will be speaking about her book sex and the sea are intimate connection with sex changing fish romantic lobsters kinky squid and other salty erotica of the deep this Saturday at the La Jolla library. Thank you so much Thank you so much for having me.