Male octopus injects female with venom during sex to avoid being eaten
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
"Females try to kill and eat their mates during or after copulation, while males use tactics to survive copulation, but sometimes females outwit them."
Curious how the spider processes all this information with their tiny brain ...
A truly wonderful work of sci-fi
that evolution should make reproducing less efficient, either the male is dead before he finish reproducing with the female or at least, he is not able to reproduce with other females.
Yet it seems to be working just fine with other species of octopuses where the male get eaten.
"Unable to reproduce with other females" is probably relevant. The relative size of different genders has a lot to do with if a species is polygamous or monogamous. Larger males the former and larger females the latter.
The female's genes are most likely to get passed down many generations if the males she mates with have genes that enable her male children to survive long enough to reproduce. Once a species gets into a state where females make a habit of eating the males during copulation, it can't readily evolve out of that state, because a female that is less aggressive will mate with males who can't succeed at mating with other females, leading to that line dying out. Sexual cannibalism is a local maximum.
So if at any point in the past there were evolutionary pressure that made cannibalism beneficial to the genes, we would expect to see it stick around until there's sufficient pressure against cannibalism to allow selection away from that local maximum.
And I am fairly certain that evolution requires much longer time scales than the 10k years of civilization humans have existed in?
That premise is the fundamental point that your argument hinges on and I see no reason to just assume it would be true, and can create plenty of plausible arguments (that I think are fairly self evident) for why it would be untrue.
As long as there are enough males in circulation that can succeed in fertilizing before being eaten, then there's no pressure on females to drop the cannibalistic strategy. Any male that cannot win the cannibalism game can only fertilize pacifist females, but a male that can win the cannibalism game has genes that can be passed on to both cannibalistic and pacifist females. So the genes of cannibalistic females have broader reach within a species that has already gotten to majority-cannibalistic because her male offspring can fertilize both types of female rather than just one type.
Again, to GP's point, just because non-cannibalism would be more beneficial to the species as a whole doesn't mean that evolutionary pressure on individual genetic lines will select away from it. The individual line is often better off being selfish and selecting the strategy that gives them the broadest possible range of propagation (hence Richard Dawkins' title, The Selfish Gene), which in this case is cannibalism.
I suppose the can develop a more advanced social structure with prenups, courts, and police, but then we're talking about millions of years.
The results of a cluster analysis are not arbitrary, even if the exact location of the boundaries can be a bit fuzzy.
Both parents are all-in, probably because some less malleable trait or characteristic, whether environmental or hereditary, requires them to be so.
THIS. The life expectancy of an octopus is extremely low - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus#Lifespan - and they're all-in on the "extreme number of offspring, microscopic survival rate" strategy. So for a male - it's a fairly reasonable tactic to end up as a big, nourishing meal for the female that will go all-in on producing the eggs of your decedents.
The orb spider figured out a hack: he ejects his member in to her after sex which keeps inseminating her from that point forward. Sure he dies, but he reproduces from beyond the grave!
What if one specific mutation of orb spider is really nice but he was killed and its "member" is in a single female orb spider limiting the greatness of a good mutation I suppose which can feel counter to evolution to me I suppose.
That's a very soft limit; a spider lays dozens (hundreds?) of eggs after mating once. Mortality is extremely high, so there's tons of room for "really nice" mutations to spread quickly.
However, as you suggest it’s not necessarily a mating thing.
If the animal is hungry and there is a food source (and no reason to do anything else), the pro-survival option is chosen.
The praying mantis is named after its characteristic posture while standing around.
There is no preying mantis.
The female benefits from a meal.
The male benefits via procreation.
A different choice by either party would be suboptimal.
There is no logic to evolution. No decisions are being made. Evolution is reactive, and the surviving lineages may only be responding effectively to some of the external forces. Evolution doesn't happen at a species level, it happens at the individual level and has downstream effects on the species.
We're seeing evolution in action. Tragically, we (individually) won't be around long enough to observe the changes in another 100 or 200 or 1000 generations.
In addition to the sibling comment's caveats, it's worth mentioning that the latter might actually be an advantage? If the male is able to continue reproducing with an unbounded number of females, and the females are limited by how often they can lay eggs (or how quickly they can after copulation), a mutation that causes females to prevent males from reproducing with other females could potentially drown out the ability of females without those mutations to reproduce (e.g. if those females were able to copulate with most males first, they'd be the only ones to produce offspring, and there could even be other adaptions or mutations that aid them in the "first to copulate" race).
For this octopus, it is more like making a prenuptial agreement, or gifting assets to family, or a public limited company.
An evolution (or artificial 'population management') where males are 66% likely or otherwise born at a 2:1 ratio wouldn't work because then you need each woman to have 3 children to create a sustainable population, meaning you need an even higher ratio of males - and so on recursively towards infinite male:female ratios.
Women don't do outright cannibalism since humans are more sophisticated, but women absolutely kill (figuratively) their mate/husband to extract as much ressource as possible (regardless of them having offspring in needs or not).
They are biologically programmed for that, but we forgot about it and/or we like to pretend this is not happening.
Reality doesn't care much about feeling, and with little countermeasures afforded to the men, birthrate has been going down tremendously in every country where women power has been unmatched.
So, the answer is actually pretty simple: it will die down until the only ones left are the males that found a new "venom" and are willing to use it.
Too much Andrew Tate?
There are horror stories where a wife divorces the man and gets the house, custody of the kids, child support, alimony, etc. Many men just opt to not get married for fear that might happen to them.
They didn't just claim that divorces can have unfavorable results for men which is a trivial claim.
They claimed birth rates are tumbling because women have attained the extractive power mentioned in their post and that, if left unchecked, human society will continue dying down... until all that's left is the sort of man that he likens to the venomous male octopus.
Many people don't want to have kids unless they are married. They don't get married because of the issues I mentioned.
Even if you ignore that, you may have to pay child support if the woman you slept with leaves you.
Also, asking for a prenup is not exactly the easiest thing. Can you imagine saying, hey I want to get married, quite possibly saying "till death do us part", but can you agree too this prenup for when we fail. Starting a marriage with the idea that you will fail doesn't seem great to me.
I read that some politicians in a. state (don't remember which), were talking about allowing a couple to remove the right of a no fault divorce, only allow at fault divorces. I think if such a thing becomes a law, that would help boost a lot of confidence for men.
He is obviously a despicable character but it's not surprising that he was able to get where he is. He is the symptom of a general sickness nobody wants to acknowledge, the only ones breaking through are the extreme assholes, nobody listen to the nuanced position and we even tell them they are like those extreme assholes.
Which is exactly what you did, and you very astutely showed exactly that there is a problem and that you are part of the problem.
Good job, thanks.
But if you want to sound more latin, octopus is a third declension noun, and those have nominative plurals that tend to end in -es, rather than the second declension which ends in -us for singular or -i for plural. Third declension nouns whose nominative form ends in -s also tend to change their root's final consonant when you change the suffix. (Eg. opus -> opera. That one doesn't end in -es because it's neuter.)
All this to say, the latin plural of octopus is octopodes.
lively bunch, reclusive, come in all sizes, from extra tiny, to back off quick, and a whole other complex octapoid lifestyle
I regularly interact with spiders, wolf spiders bieng my favorites by far, sometimes called jumping spiders, they are sight hunters and dont build webs, and seem to stay in a certain teritory for days or weeks, before moving on
In the US, it is regional to the east coast, both north and south. It is also common in African American speech.
Another one that we misunderstand a lot is virus. It looks like the typical second declension thing ending in -us. It is actually a rare categorization of word, the 4th declension.
But it is a common occurrence in languages that when rules are complicated and confusing that they get generalized to simpler patterns from elsewhere in the language.
Romance languages have done that to Latin too! I gave an example of opera being the plural of opus. A lot of romance languages have reinterpreted neuter plurals as feminine singulars, because of that -a suffix.
By that logic irregardless is also not really incorrect.