Female Squid Wear Fake Testes to Avoid Male Advances

(Photo: Joshua Sera)

Far beyond getting friendzoned is this, the bluntest form of rejection in the animal kingdom. Female opalescent inshore squid (Doryteuthis opalescens) can turn on stripes that resemble male testes. Daniel DiMartini, a doctoral student at the University of California at Santa Barbara, explained:

"This discovery reveals a fundamental relationship between the switchable leucophores and the tunable color-producing iridocytes, suggesting they share a mechanism at the molecular level," DeMartini said.

DeMartini noted that the white stripe looks very similar to the white testes seen in male squid. Turning on these leucophores could help females look like males to avoid attention from notoriously aggressive males, the researchers say.

Link -via Dave Barry


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