"... sugars and fats squished out of his tergal gland. As the lovely lady nibbles, the male locks onto her with one penis while another penis delivers a sperm package. If everything goes smoothly, a roach’s romp can last around 90 minutes. But increasingly, cockroach coitus is going really, weirdly wrong.... [T]hese new cockroaches seemed to have no affection for a form of sugar called glucose.... So when one of these glucose-averse females takes a bite of the male’s nuptial gift, it literally turns bitter in her mouth, and she bolts before he can complete the double barrel lock-and-pop maneuver."
From "Cockroach Reproduction Has Taken a Strange Turn/In response to pesticides, many cockroach females have lost their taste for sweet stuff, which changes how they make the next generation of insects" (NYT)(with very explicit video of cockroaches mating).
Those... things on the end of a cockroach are 2 penises?!
You might think that if the females have lost their taste for this sugar, there will be less mating and therefore fewer cockroaches, but the article says no. It's a problem because we humans have been relying on sweetness to deliver poison. The cockroaches themselves will find a way.
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31 comments:
"You might think that if the females have lost their taste for this sugar, there will be less mating and therefore fewer cockroaches, but the article says no. It's a problem because we humans have been relying on sweetness to deliver poison. The cockroaches themselves will find a way."
That's probably why more female cockroaches are no longer finding sweetness appealing; it is an adaptation to protect them from being poisoned.
As the old saying goes, Two penises are better than one.
Hey!! Did you hear about the Mexican with two penises??
He called one Jose, and the other one Hose B.
Nature always finds a way. Well...eventually. However, I wonder if it ever considered that it would have to find a way past multiple pronouns, gender fluidity, and trans/not-trans people to keep a species going?
Do cockroaches go through such things? Are there activist cockroaches?
I think I already answered my own question.
My question is, if evolution is true then why haven’t humans evolved more penises? Suppose you had penises hanging from every part of your body, say twenty to fifty penises. That would give you a much greater chance at spreading your dna and that’s what evolution is all about, right?
Ergo, evolution is false. One penis proves it.
Cockroach, cockroach candlelight
Doin' the town and doin' it right
Just some porkin’, won’t need no Orkin
Cockroach Susie, Cockroach Sam
Do the wildest thing
Out in cockroach land
And they holler
Sammy’s pud collar!
And they whirl and they twirl with them two dicks
Not a thing in this world that they can’t fix
Floatin' like the heavens above
Looks like cockroach love
Why do you think they are called cock-roaches?
So cockroaches have two penises and American women have only one?
That sweet stuff is really bad for you. The Keto craze is even sweeping the bug world.
This is reminiscent of Amber Heard's testimony.
Sounds like rape-rape.
@madAsHell...very funny : )
Who is assuming they are 'male'?
Some words are just inherently funny. Underpants. Heebie-jeebies. Nimrod. Twink. Carumba. And of course, penis. And even funnier if plural: Penises. (Perhaps it’s Penii.)
That said, penises are a serious subject that deserve scrutiny. And there’s no better place to begin that with cockroaches. Cockroach… when you think about it they really are well-named.
File under: Things I do not need to know or want to know and would be happy not to hear about ever again.
But I can understand that as far as grossness goes you've hit the trifecta: cockroaches, multiple penises, and quasi-vomitous secretions, with the old double barrel lock-and-pop maneuver thrown in as a bonus.
Isn’t it finally time we addressed predatory sexism in the animal kingdom?
We don't have to worry about this, do we? I have every confidence that the pesticide scientists will figure this out if government leaves them to it.
After a hundred years, mice don't seem to be evolving a reluctance to approaching a piece of wood with a spring on it.
’…he will scoot his butt toward her, open his wings and offer her a homemade meal...’
I don’t have wings, but otherwise those are my go-to moves.
The mating ritual of Chuck Schumer has no interest to me.
They didn't outlast the dinosaurs by being slow on the evolutionary trigger. Kind of surprised that no one in Hollywood signed Jeff Goldblum to do a porn knockoff of The Fly: The Cockroach, co-starring...Madonna. And you thought the 80s couldn't have gotten any cheesier.
My Mr. Potato Head had 2 penises...until he lost one in a cannibal attack.
Althouse writes, "Those... things on the end of a cockroach are 2 penises?!"
What makes Althouse think the Nooyawk Times is a reliable source of information, especially scientific information? She should remember the NYT says pregnant men exist, that alone should make her skeptical.
No. Those "things" are not penises. They are cerci.
The cerci are modified legs. Before the insects arose, their ancestors, the Pararthropoda (an extant representative is the velvet worm) had many more legs than the six that characterize modern bugs. Many insects retain paired vestiges of these lost legs known generally as styli, which they use for traction on vertical surfaces.
Cerci are highly specialized styli. Some are sensory organs, some are weapons, some are copulatory organs, and a few others are vestigial with no evident functions. Cockroaches have both styli and cerci.
"Ergo, evolution is false. One penis proves it."
No, the Theory of Evolution is not falsifiable. If it were falsifiable, the number of existing observations that would disprove it is nearly infinite. But it isn't falsifiable.
The idea is sometimes expressed as "survival of the fittest", but that's wrong. It's survival of the most capable of surviving. If you think about that, you will see that it is a tautology. What has survived is, demonstrably, what is most capable of surviving. So, all the books and papers and shit are just people coming up with ingenious ways to explain why what exists just evolutionarily had to exist.
Jupiter writes, "No, the Theory of Evolution is not falsifiable. If it were falsifiable, the number of existing observations that would disprove it is nearly infinite. But it isn't falsifiable."
That's intellectual crap, Jupiter, and you ought to know that. What's NOT falsifiable is the creationist alternative.
As J.S.B. Haldane noted, all that the creationists need to show to falsify evolution is a fossil rabbit in Precambrian strata.
Well-read creationists know that quotation by heart, but for some reason, they spend all their time giving sermons or making videos. You never see them patrolling the sedimentary outcrops or painstakingly excavating curious shapes in the rock with a dental pick. One surmises they know they'll never find that petrified bunny in the pile of manure the creationists keep re-sifting. The answers aren't in Genesis, they're under your feet. Start digging.
And in their thousands they opened up the dictionaries and encyclopaedias... for all I know many were aware of the existence of the 'tergal gland' etc; not me. I recognised (I thought) the Latin tergum, which is back, the backside, but in this case the OED was very little enlightening. Thanks, Quaestor, for the more scientific explanation. I always thought those peni... cerci were (don't laugh!) pincers for cockroach defense.
"As J.S.B. Haldane noted, all that the creationists need to show to falsify evolution is a fossil rabbit in Precambrian strata."
Are you saying, that if I find a fossil rabbit in a Precambrian stratum somewhere, you will stop believing that those swallows in the Galapagos have different beaks because of adaption to different environments? I would hope not. That would be silly. A tautology cannot be falsifiable.
I suppose if we regard "The Theory of Evolution" as a creation myth, then it is falsifiable, as you suggest. But as a principle of variation within existing species, it is inherently true, and also vacuous.
I was going to say something witty but I'm way too late. Still laughing. You people crack me up.
And Haldane was a Red, so there.
Oh, you said J S B, not J B S Haldane. Can't out-pedant me that easily.
Just going to point out that the etymologically correct plural of "penis" is "penes." Not just because I'm a pedant. But because it's so much fun to say. Penes, penes, penes!
Try to resist yelling it out loud. I dare you.
Are you saying, that if I find a fossil rabbit in a Precambrian stratum somewhere, you will stop believing that those swallows in the Galapagos have different beaks because of adaption to different environments?
I would be forced to doubt their ancestors had typical finch beaks. I would also conclude they were not archosaurs. Belief has nothing to do with it.
BTW, sorry about that silly misdirected link.
Try this one.
BTW, sorry about that silly misdirected link.
Try this one.
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