Dammit Jim!

According to Tangled Bank, a blog carnival is a weekly showcase of good weblog writing, selected by the authors themselves. This sounded like a nice way to motivate myself to actually write about biology (which is for some reason hard for me to do outside work) and see some other blogs. So although I’m not sure my stuff counts as ‘good weblog writing’, I submitted a couple links to the new Tangled Bank. The host Lab Cat, had this to say about me: …which brings us to sex. Dammit Jim seems to have an fixation on this subject…. Well can’t really argue with that although I probably should get some non-sex related biology up at some point.

Just in case anyone is in need of a last minute Valentine’s gift, I just thought I’d share what I gave the girlfriend last year (it was her birthday actually but it would work for Valentine’s). And no it’s not some cheesy sappy thing so you don’t have to immediately stop reading. Anyway it was signing us up for ballroom dance lessons together. It’s worked out really well. She really likes it and now we have something to do together every week. We learn things like waltz, samba and jive. We still aren’t very good but we’re improving and having a good time. As an additional bonus, it could probably be set up last minute if you just google a nearby dance studio and call them up. If you’re in the Halifax area, Edgett Dance has been pretty nice for us.

I was browsing journals the other day trying to figure out where to send a paper when I came across a paper called Genital damage in the orb-web spider increases paternity success. I guess I have a weird sense of curiosity because I had to take a look and see what they were talking about.

When females of a species mate with several males, evolution can develop some pretty weird adaptations in males competing to fertilize the egg. More numerous, faster or cooperative sperm can improve the chances of their sperm reaching the egg first. Another alternative is to try to prevent other males from mating with that female.

As a way to interfere with other males, many species develop sticky semen to form copulatory plugs blocking other sperm access to the egg. I had heard of this before but what I didn’t know was that some insects have taken this method to an extreme and actually leaves pieces of their genitals behind in the female. These pieces had been shown to protect the males’ sperm against competition by blocking rivals from mating with the female. Similar genital breakage had been observed in spiders but since spider females like to eat their mates and males have two penis-like organs, called pedipalps, scientists debated whether a spider sacrificing one of his genitalia could be a sort of quick release to allow the males to live another day and mate again.

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A couple weeks ago I made a WordPress plugin to generate unique monsters for each commenter. Don Park came up with the original idea for representing users with geometric shapes. Since I already had the framework in place I thought I’d make a WordPress plugin for the original geometric Identicons. If you want to visually represent users (but maybe you don’t like monsters so much?) then this plugin is for you.

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