by Male blue -dressed squid inject women during sex with poison and paralyze their larger buddies so as not to be eaten.
The blue -dressed squid is a tiny, highly dangerous cephalopod, which often occurs in flat reefs and tidal pools.
One of the four types of blue-octopus uses an extremely strong neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin-also present in buffer fish to immobilize its prey.
A new study suggests that male blue-fed ink fish inject the poison into the woman’s aorta at the beginning of the pairing.
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According to the main author of the study, Dr. Wen-sung from the University of Queensland, women in full size are about the size of a golf balls etwa two to five times larger than their male colleagues.
Female inkfish tend to eat their friends, he said.
“Sexual cannibalism is very common in kephalopods.
“When female blue squids lay eggs, spend about six weeks without just taking care of the eggs. You really need a lot of energy to bring you through this breeding process. “
Male inkfish have a specialized arm for mating – known as a hectocotylus – that transfers a sperm capsule into the female’s urge.
Men have developed different strategies to avoid their friends during the copulation: the argonauts sacrifice their mating arm, for example, and let it drop after mating. Other species have an elongated hectocotylus.
“The mating arm of the blue -dressed octopus is much shorter,” said Chung. “You cannot be able to reach distant pairings and have to carry out an increasing mating strategy.”
The researchers observed male inkfish that watched women during the mating sessions between 40 and 75 minutes. When the tetrodotoxin became effective, the females stopped breathing after about eight minutes, and their pupils no longer reacted to light.
“The mating ended when the females regained control of their arms and deported the men,” the scientists noticed.
None of the females died during copulation and usually fed the next day, which indicates that tetrodotoxin is resistant, said Chung.
The enozing through blue -dressed ink fish can be fatal to humans; In Moreton Bay, fatal cases were also documented in green sea turtles, which accidentally recorded the inkfish when eating seagras.
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Blue octopuses, like most octopus types, show a semelparity, a breeding strategy in which an organism dies after a one-time reproduction. The men die shortly after copulation while the females hatch after their larvae.
Chung described the unusual pairing technique in blue-dressed inkfish ink fishing an evolutionary “arms race” between the two sexes.
“Because the females became much larger and stronger, the man finally had to have a specific strategy to ensure that his genes can be transferred to the next generation.”
Research was published in the magazine Current Biology.
