Spider mite males undress maturing females to win the first mating
phys.org
phys.org
Okay that's a crazy fact. These male spiders are pretty much just their mother from a genetic perspective!
There is a photo of the (highly magnified) intact aedeagus of some water beetle.
I want to send it to soneone as the world's weirdest dick pic but I can't think of anyone else who would think it was funny.
Bitch: on the female of the species Lucy Cooke https://worldcat.org/en/title/1322488372
Even I find that unpalatable because well, it doesn’t make much sense. Most of nature can’t be sexist. That’s a sociological term meaning prejudice on the basis of sex. Most species have neither society nor prejudice so the whole concept doesn’t apply. Same for gender as a social construct. What does it even mean for a wild animal to have a gender?
My question was a sincere and good faith question. Those are the other two things I considered saying.
When I joined HN, it was roughly 98 percent male. I'm a woman. For a lot of things, it seems I'm dammed if I do and damned if I don't. There is no assumption of good faith and if I address the assumption of bad faith it's just viewed as more bad behavior on my part. People don't seem to think I read about and comment on "women's issues" because such things genuinely interest me and are pertinent to my life.
I am routinely treated with suspicion, as if I'm on HN with a nefarious feminist agenda, and never mind that I've done everything in my power to make it clear I don't self identify as a feminist, I'm medically handicapped and my agenda is to distract myself from the misery of my life while feeding my mind while trapped at home and too sick to do other things.
To take a quote from the author: "The main themes (of the book) is the power of cultural bias"
(I choose to assume that the "buzzfeed" comment was directed towards the content of the excerpt, not the choice of selecting that specific excerpt.)
All I did was pulled out a blurb from their link clarifying that the book isn't exactly an exposé on the fascinating sex lives of eight legged critters.
The threading system of HN has both benefits and drawbacks. In this case a chronological ordering might had been better. As a side note, I fully agree with your take that the book isn't likely about the sex lives of eight legged critters. When I saw the title I was suspicious about the content, and the excerpt provided further evidence to back up that suspicion. As such it was a very helpful excerpt.
Then --
What is this article, the one about the spiders, trying to say?
I found it fairly disturbing, what with being female and sympathizing with the female spider, not the male. On the other hand, I don't molt, so I decided to not go there. But that was my first thought.
Historically, women often required help to get undressed from the get ups they were expected to wear. Much less so these days.
“A study in 2009 that tested the male satin bowerbirds’ problem-solving skills was the first to show that cognitive performance is associated with mating success and females prefer the most nimble-minded male. Male budgerigars that demonstrate their problem-solving smarts have also been shown to be more attractive to females. So female choice could be responsible for shaping not only a male’s body and behaviour but also his brain. This idea isn’t new. Darwin himself proposed that sexual selection could, in fact, be responsible for the exceptional evolution of human cognition – especially the more ‘self-expressive’ aspects of human behaviour, such as art, morality, language and creativity.The idea that female choice might have polished the human brain into brilliance would have been the ultimate blow to the Victorian scientific patriarchy – hitting them right between the eyes, where it hurt most. Female choice is indeed a powerful evolutionary force, but also seemingly random. Why do all female satin bowerbirds love Matisse blue, however, and not Turner’s yellow?”
Excerpt From Bitch Lucy Cooke
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