Okay, we at SexFeed have figured out the key to life, the universe and everything. If human beings can evolve to do what the wild hawkfish can do we will all be too interested in doing it to ever start wars, be rotten to each other or otherwise botch things up.
What the wild hawkfish can do, with evident effortlessness, is change sexes when it suits it to do so. The fish travel in harems with one dominant male mating with many females. When there are too many females in a particular harem a couple of the larger females in the harem will change sexes –Just like that. No surgery. No period of living like a male hawkfish. No nothing!– and take over half the harem. Also, when a male hawkfish has lost a lot of females in his harem to a larger male he can just swap out and become a girl “instead of wasting precious energy fighting a losing battle,” writes Chelsea Whyte of New Scientist. Tatsuta Kadota of Hiroshima University observed reverse sex transformations in the fish for the first time and confirmed that they can reproduce as female after having been male.
“Because of our frame of reference we think of gender being fated one way or another,” says fish ecologist Scott Heppell of Oregon State University in Corvallis. “These animals are a lot more flexible than some species.”
Best party trick ever.
Seriously. If we could do this we would spend so much time just going back and forth –playing “Now you see it! Now you don’t!” just because we could– that we’d probably forget about the actual sex part altogether.
What the wild hawkfish can do, with evident effortlessness, is change sexes when it suits it to do so. The fish travel in harems with one dominant male mating with many females. When there are too many females in a particular harem a couple of the larger females in the harem will change sexes –Just like that. No surgery. No period of living like a male hawkfish. No nothing!– and take over half the harem. Also, when a male hawkfish has lost a lot of females in his harem to a larger male he can just swap out and become a girl “instead of wasting precious energy fighting a losing battle,” writes Chelsea Whyte of New Scientist. Tatsuta Kadota of Hiroshima University observed reverse sex transformations in the fish for the first time and confirmed that they can reproduce as female after having been male.
“Because of our frame of reference we think of gender being fated one way or another,” says fish ecologist Scott Heppell of Oregon State University in Corvallis. “These animals are a lot more flexible than some species.”
Best party trick ever.
Seriously. If we could do this we would spend so much time just going back and forth –playing “Now you see it! Now you don’t!” just because we could– that we’d probably forget about the actual sex part altogether.
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