Squid Males "Bisexual"—Evolved Shot-in-the-Dark Mating Strategy
Mating with anything with eight arms pays off in dim depths, study says.
That's because would-be suitors of the hand-size species Octopoteuthis deletron, which live in the murky depths of the eastern Pacific Ocean, can't easily tell the males from the females, the research shows.
"They can see each other, but they are not able very well to distinguish between the sexes at the distance at which they decide, 'I'm going to mate' or 'I'm not going to mate,'" said study leader Hendrik Hoving, of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California.
So "males mate with basically any member of the same species. ... They just take a chance."
It's also hard to tell he from she: A female squid's defining feature is a patch of wrinkled skin.
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