- Joined
- Dec 24, 2002
- Messages
- 1,169
monty;112982 said:It looks like the abstract pretty much says it all, though, right?
I could imagine it being just an activation of some useful sexual characteristics, in the "why do men have nipples?" sense, or a throwback to a Cambrian hermaphrodite mollusc's genes being re-enabled. Very curious indeed. And quite possibly a Rosetta stone for "how is sex determined on cephalopods" research!
Grrr.. that abstract was pretty abstract. There's difference between intersexuality and actual sexual reassignment. I would like to read this paper to see if there was any environmental factors (i.e. hormones in the water, etc.). The genes for hermaphrodism are there, I would bet, buried in countless millenia of evolutionary pathways. Yes, cephs are usually gonochoristic and all, but more about these oddball males would be nice - at least to see if there is a reproductive effect here.
It seems more like the paper should focus on identifying and describing the pseudohermaphroditism rather than postulate on the distribution of the anomaly(?) across the entire population unless the sample size was really significant and covered the entire oceanographic range.
"Why do men have nipples?" - besides them being functional in rare cases of gynecomastia, plus that some species of male bats actually functionally lactate, its also because all vertebrate embryos are inherently female, but recieve the male "trigger" during development. You probably already knew that.
I can't imagine the sex being determined by temperature (great nod to Caretta by the way - I've worked with that species and I have a soft spot in my heart for sea turtles) in octos, but then again who knows?
- John