A bacterium (I’ve always wanted to say a bacterium) of the largest known bacteria is nearly an inch long. Whatever the bacteriological word for gnarly is, this is that. Not only can you see them with the naked eye, but you can see them with the naked eye in the naked everything, if that’s your thing. But I digress. Anyway, they make great pets.
Today I learned that there are anywhere from 100 million to 500 million sperm cells per human male ejaculation. Or according to another article, from 40 million to 1.2 billion, that is dudes can ejaculate the equivalent of the population of California up to the population of India. I don’t know why some guys have more than others, but most men are somewhere in between those. That’s a lot of little Juniors and Juniorettes. A healthy twenty year old male can easily snuff out half a billion little copies of himself on a boring Friday night. By the time that twenty year old is a fifty year old that might have reached a half trillion copies of himself. Rarely do these thoughts cross a man’s mind at the time, though. Nothing crosses his mind during ejaculation. The frontal lobe goes on autopilot and the thalamus and hypothalamus and various other parts of the brain that pre-date conscious thought take over. It sure feels good, but don’t expect us to write a poem describing it. We can’t even remember it. A hundred million little copies of us just just rushed down our urethras and we’re no more aware of it than a frog is. It’s not until it hits the nerve endings packed into the heads of our dongs that we’re jolted back into consciousness, even speech. Oh god oh god oh god. Like, I said, it’s not poetry, but at least the frontal lobe has sparked into life again. That’s the part of ejaculation we remember. Eloquence comes later, after we’ve washed up and made sure no one was watching us.
I have no idea what happens to the little fellas that never even get ejaculated. How long can a little copy of me wait in there? And what happens to all those me’s then?
I also learned that sperm cells are the tiniest little things, and even a half billion of them only make up about 5% of a dude’s semen, the rest being various fluids, saltiness and flavoring, not to mention stickiness and whatever it is that leaves stains on ceilings. Two thirds of this delicate brew is produced within the scrotum somehow, the other third by the prostate which apparently actually has a purpose. I mean, who knew?
Funny I learned all this at 65, though maybe it’s better that way, so I didn’t suffer guilt complexes afterward, especially since my testicles have been busily producing half a trillion little Brick cells and I’ve failed to reproduce any of them, the poor things. Then again half a trillion Bricks would get pretty annoying. There’s a reason for everything.
(I have no idea when I wrote this one, I found it in the pile of drafts.)
Does anyone know or care, she posted on Facebook, that lobster and crabs are just giant bugs?
Lobsters and crabs, I mansplained, are giant bugs the way humans are giant hummingbirds or rattlesnakes or lampreys or Gila monsters or cane toads which are all as closely related to human beings as crabs and lobsters are to insects. Crabs, lobsters and insects all have the basic features of arthropods—they have the hard exoskeletons that the soft parts of the body are held within, as well as segmented bodies (head, thorax and abdomen) and paired jointed appendages (all those matching legs, claws and antennae.) Anyone, bibbed and covered with crustacean goo, who actually eats a lobster gets a beautiful lesson in arthropod anatomy. Humans, fish, reptiles, amphibians and your Thanksgiving turkey all have the basic chordate design of backbones (or a notochord made of cartilage like lampreys do) and all our edible parts are built around that backbone and the skeleton that developed out of it (except the brains tucked inside our skulls but those are more like the marrow and neurons inside our spinal column than the rest of our soft body parts). So if a lobster could think about it he (or her) would probably be offended by us comparing her (or him) to a cockroach, the way we would be offended (or I would, anyway) by being compared to, say, a hagfish.
That being said, lobsters are way too gross to eat, because they look just like giant bugs.
You’ll be pleased to find out that I just purchased twenty ghost shrimp on EBay. I thought the loach had eaten the previous herd of ten, but I was delighted to discover there were survivors. So now I’m getting a bunch more, figuring the loach will take his share but the rest will be around to partake in the great fish dying due anytime now, as the vast herd of platys reaches their life expectancy and bloops their last bloop. Some fish corpses float, some sink. The floaters I scoop up with the net and toss into the planter out front. No point in wasting good fertilizer. The sinkers are a pain in the ass. So the shrimp get those. They can reduce a fish carcass to nothing in a matter of days. I’d rather not think about it. And the platys own culinary kinks guarantee the population will not recover, because a platy’s favorite dish is fresh born platy. None of the babies survive the feasts, and as there is no longer a dense jungle of floating vegetation for the fry to hide in—they ate that too, for roughage I guess—the babies are easy pickings. You can see the adults gathering together and leisurely devouring platy DNA. It’s fucked up. But it did neatly stop the aquarium’s population explosion, and there was one baby, as in a single fish, that has made it to adulthood in the past year. They’re efficient, you gotta give them that. So efficient they’re eating themselves into extinction in our tank. Platys live three to four years, typically, but invariably fish in our tank live to the outer edge of their life expectancy, so I won’t be surprised to see many of them last for five. But eventually the lot of them, nearly all of which born in a single year, will go to fish heaven, leaving all sorts of niches for us to fill with species that don’t fuck so goddamn much. Some fish have no shame at all.
A plastic baby platypus:
A real baby platypus:
Now you know.
Blue Planet 2. Problem solving and coordinated group action by clownfish. Who knew? Besides other clownfish, I mean. And what’s with the meter long carnivorous worm? Teeth sharp as pinking shears, hence the name: Bobbitt. As in Lorena. David Attenborough left that part out (no pun intended).The damn things can get up to ten feet, I read, like sandworms in Dune. They can lop a foot long fish clean in half. A Devonian Era nightmare, giant meat eating invertebrates. Acid visions of carnivorous trilobites. Thankfully they went instinct first.
Then the scene with hundreds of reef sharks swimming menacingly above thousands of groupers. Suddenly l’amour drives the groupers mad and they rush upward into the sharks, shedding eggs and milt to the seven seas. The sharks go into a feeding frenzy and the surging waters are all blood and roe and sperm, a veritable fish fuck massacre. Stella!
The clownfish were so neat and orderly and mannered in comparison. They’ll go far. Check back in a hundred million years.
(Originally posted on BricksScience.com in 2018).
1968, it says on the back in my mother’s flawless longhand, Age 11. I was probably 5’6” by then. I was 5’5” earlier in 5th grade, which I remember since the kids said I was fifty foot five. I peaked out at 6’5” when I was sixteen, so I was gaining height about two inches a year. Must have spent a lot of time waiting for a flood. Adolescence had trouble keeping up and I was coming in on six feet before my voice finally cracked in 9th grade. I had the voice I have now by the time I was a sophomore. I remember all the songs I could sing just a few months before were hopelessly above my range. No more Simon and Garfunkel for me, Emily would have to find herself. Not that it bothered me any, because suddenly my voice had power, and no one ever fucked with me. It was like being a grown up in 10th grade surrounded by all these silly kids. That’s a very easy way to begin adulthood, everybody thinking you’re somebody because you’re so goddamn tall, everyone seeking your approval, dudes apologizing who hadn’t done a damn thing to apologize for but just wanted to be safe. But then that’s a behavior that’s been hardwired into us apes—gorillas, chimps and all the various human species—since we evolved from monkeys 25 million years ago. I’m just carrying on the tradition.
Damn, man, got an overpopulation crisis in the aquarium. Platys up the wazoo. They’ve live bearers—as opposed to egg layers—and being really awful parents they tend to devour their own offspring. You can see them hunt them down, moms and dads and extended family members all in an orgy of devouring their own genes, evolution be damned. Of course, this keeps the population in check. Now in the wilds of Central America the newly born hide amongst the vegetation. In your typical aquarium with its handful of plastic plants that is not much of an option and the entire litter (or whatever a bunch of fry is called) is lunch. Alas, our tank is positively lush with plants, real plants, unplastic. So a mess of the little fuckers made it. And now they’re adults, beautiful, happy, healthy adults. On the handy side they’re amazing algae eaters, better even than the impossible to spell otocinclus. And they don’t make a lot of noise. Or pick on the other fish. The tank looks like a freshwater tropical reef, plants and fish everywhere. Have no idea what to do. Maybe consider them an investment, being that they’re running four bucks each in the shops now so eventually we can retire. But we’re already retired. They’re too small for a Friday Night Fish Fry, and too big to put down the garbage disposal without years of analysis. If anyone has a fish tank that could use a few of them, you can have as many as you want. It’s an incredibly healthy aquarium—we haven’t had any fish diseases since the 80’s, three tanks ago. Our damn fish live forever.
In the meantime I’ll sit here and watch them swimming and blooping and chasing each other and think about life. There sure is a lot of it in this fish tank. Damn. And you thought you had problems.
“Female termites in Japan are reproducing without males” – Newsweek
Parthenogenesis. Fairly common among the social insects. It’s cloning. Upside is that it avoids sexual reproduction, which takes up considerable resources and requires otherwise useless males like yours truly. Downside is that eventually something comes up that your hardwired DNA can’t handle. You’ve parthogenetically opted your DNA out of natural selection. Extinction looms. Which is what happens when selfish genes are way too selfish. Hence most species have sex instead of cloning around.
I suspect that the exponential increase in the pet cat population led to the exponential increase in urban and suburban coyotes which led to the decrease in the time cats spend outdoors which has caused the exponential increase in the urban and suburban brown rat population which has caused an increase in the amount of rat poison used which has dramatically increased the number of dead and dying rats which has led to the increased mortality in owls I read about today.
Brick's Science 