December 18, 2003
Transgendered Toadfish
The San Francisco Chronicle reports about new studies into a very interesting breed of native fish in the Bay Area. Males come in two types, the butch males that make loud humming noises to attract females, and female-impersonating males that are hung bigger, keep quiet, and sometimes pick up "trade".
Read on for more details and clip here for an audio file to hear the mating call.
Most Sausalito, California residents know the humming toadfish, whose loud and incessant underwater droning all summer long keeps angry shore dwellers and houseboat residents awake for nights.
The sound -- a perfect A-flat -- was a mystery for years, blamed by some conspiracy theorists in the 1980s on secret experiments by the Army Corps of Engineers lab on the city's waterfront, on the local water treatment plant or even on extraterrestrials.
Then, a San Francisco marine biologist recognized it as the annoying sound that he'd heard as a graduate student studying fish and trying to sleep on the beach in Baja California: It was the sex call of a species known as the plainfin midshipman.
Biologists puzzled
But the love lives of toadfish still puzzle biologists. No one knows, for example, exactly how or why the fish developed their astonishing love call.
Although there is only one type of female, the males come in two types: the dominant Type 1 that thrums the loudest and longest, and the wilier Type 2 males that vibrate much more softly.
The sound of the dominant Type 1 is more likely to attract the females. But the Type 2 has developed an interesting strategy. By mimicking the females in appearance, it may attract a dominant male that attempts copulation. At times, the meek males end up fertilizing the females along with the dominant ones. Type II or "sneaker" males are smaller males that cannot produce the sustained humming of the larger fish. Unable to attract females, sneaker males frequent nests, darting in to fertilize eggs while the larger males are vocalizing. Sneaker males, though smaller overall, have much larger reproductive organs comprising up to 15 percent of their body weight, compared to 1 percent for the Type I fish.
I weigh 170 pounds. If I were a Type 2 "Sneaker" Toadfish, my dick would weigh 25.5 pounds. How much would yours weigh?
Posted by thesword at December 18, 2003 10:03 AMPosted in:
