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So cute!
Agreed. It’s pretty damn funny.
Or at least several dozen amoeba lifespans.
It’s not every day you get to hear about genetically identical amoebas in fetid water.
Somebody HAS been reading your column for a very long time.
Well done. Fucking hilarious.
Just don’t get started on the female-bluehead-wrasse-until-graduation thing.
It’s not every day you get to hear about genetically identical amoebas in fetid water.
I somehow imagine that you pretty darn close if you read the Savage Love inbox daily.
Funny, and with a splash of Isabella Rossellini’s “Green Porn” for good measure.
So funny! And the biology’s not bad either.
This is great.
Also good, though actually more informative: “Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice To All Creation,” by Olivia Judson.
She doesn’t parody Savage Love, but she uses the sex advice column format to talk about evolutionary sexual behavior in non-mammals.
No, the biology’s not bad at all, except that all worker ants are female. But we can get around that by pretending it’s a termite that wrote in.
That was awesome. I think I liked the mantis one the best… it’s 2010, head-biting comes standard!
@12: I noticed that one too.
Still funny.
The most glaring biological error I saw had to do with the question from the polyamorous ant. The only males in an ant colony are the drones, whose only function is to mate with freshly hatched queens (which then go out and form their own colony). The workers are sterile females.
If I hadn’t already read Dr. Tatiana, I’d have found this hilarious. Since I have, it just seems like a blatant rip off with Savage Love references sprinkled in.
(I’m not saying it IS a rip off. It’s possible the writer came up with the idea independently.)
@15: Ditto. Drones die soon after mating, and they definitely all have sex organs. Making males is somewhat costly for eusocial insects because through a weird sex determination system (haplodiploidy) males are less related to the queen than females. So when they’re produced, the goal is for them to reproduce ASAP with as many future queens as possibly (if they mate multiply) so they can continue to pass on the mother queen’s genes.
Today’s educational message was brought to you by : graduate school!
Biology nerd combined with Dan Savage fan. What’s not to love?
“Take that, MomDad!” genuinely made me laugh out loud. So funny.
That was completely amazing.
Just got out of a long, dull, soul-killing proffer. This was just what I needed.
Amazing.
This should be a permanent installment on either this blog or the other; it’s soooo cute!!
I dig this for serious.
Nice! A call-in from a naked mole rat asexual into dom-sub games (preferably involving blindfolds) would have been a good addition.
That was absolutely hilarious.
@11 and @16 are right: This IS a blatantly unoriginal (and biologically inaccurate) ripoff of Dr. Olivia Judson. Dan should plug that fabulous book instead (he must have read it already!); “Dr. Tatiana” makes it clear that any sexual quirk thought up by humans is pretty bland compared to what other creatures are up to.
There is nothing new under the internet, alas. (Alas, I say!) I hadn’t read Dr. Tatiana’s stuff before I wrote this, but it looks pretty funny, so everyone should read that, too. (If it makes you feel better, #26, I’ll donate the zero dollars I earned on this to invertebrate sex therapy charities.) Thanks to the rest of you for your entomological corrections–this has been almost as much fun as when I got the grammar police riled up over my use of the word “gerund.” Cheers!
I find it amusing and well written. It made my day
P.S. I should clarify, since this is the internet and people assume snark, that I wasn’t being sarcastic about thanking you for your corrections–I intentionally went easy on the fact-checking in anticipation of juicy emails about the correct usage of the term “motile zoospores.”
There was a fly on my screen the whole time I was reading it, and I *swear* it was reading, too!