Lamprologus callipterus: sexually unscrupulous fish.
Most people who know me at all know that flounders blow my mind. (Or, as Glennis said unenthusiastically the other day, “Yeah, you mention flounders a lot.”) This is because flounders go through the craziest puberty ever. As a young fish, it swims around upright, all cute like in the Little Mermaid.
Awww!
But, a mature flounder lies flat on it’s side at the bottom of the ocean - it doesn’t need an eye on both sides of it’s head, one would just look at dirt. So when it hits fish adolescence, ONE EYEBALL POPS OUT OF IT’S SOCKET AND MIGRATES TO THE OTHER SIDE OF IT’S HEAD!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUGHHHHGHGHH!!!!!
Ok? So flounders are worth mentioning, I think.
But flounders are not the only object of my fish obsession. Another favorite is the Lamprologus Callipterus, which for the purposes of this post I’ll call the pimpyfish. The pimpyfish lives in a Lake Tanganyika in Africa, along with a lot of other notably weird fish, and their particular oddness is - like all fascinating things you read about on the internet - sexual.
The male pimpyfish is 30 times the size of a female (the largest sexual size difference in the world). Males attract females to their harem by collecting shells into a little pile, and then showing them off to the girls. They swim around them, checking things out, and if the lady likes what she sees, she moves in to one of the shells & lay some eggs. So one male will have a little mountain of shells, filled with females, and he’ll swim by them and just jiz into the shells indiscriminately. (Or as NOVA online says, “spewing sperm all over the place.” Nice, NOVA.)
BUT!! There is a second type of male - a dwarf male pimpyfish who looks just like a little lady fish. He will swim around shell mountain like he’s checking things out - lisping and making sexy eyes at the enormous male. Then he’ll slip into one of the occupied shells, like he’s just one of the girls or a harmless little gay transexual fish, and then totally fuck her! Or at least squirt fish spooge on her eggs. Not surprisingly, the dwarf males have remarkably big balls - even though they are tiny, the dwarf fish’s testes are three times as large as those of the larger male.
Oh no, see, um, we’re just talking. About periods.
I salute you, dwarf male pimpyfish. You are a shameless, dirty little fish.
Sources:
Blackwell Synergy
Nova Online
April 21st, 2008 at 7:46 pm
yeah, my eyeball drifted around to the other side during puberty. Kind of traumatic for a teenager trying to get chicks