Don't ask me how I stumbled across this, but here goes. Brooke L W(eaver) Miller, apparently some kind of graduate student in evolutionary biology or ecology or something at UC Santa Cruz (Home of the Mighty Banana Slugs) is studying sexual competition in, you guessed it, banana slugs.
As if slugs weren't disgusting enough--and banana slugs are more disgusting than most (they're big, yellow, sort of phallic, and in the northwest where I come from they produce enough slime that they can actually crawl out from under a coating of salt)--now, thanks to Brooke, we can watch them a) have sex, and b) gnaw off each other's (and apparently their own) sexual apparatus.
Not for the faint of heart.
Now ask me how I was supposed to be spending my evening.
2 comments:
As a resident of the Pacific Northwest, I share your opinion of slugs. When Noah was gathering up the critters, couldn't he have left the slugs behind? And the flies. And I could go on.
More to the point, I remember your spectrogram site from when I was taking Phonetics a year ago. I linked our WebCT class to it so other students could practice with spectrograms.
Well, now you've been linked again! A group of us graduate students got tired of seeing students handing in papers with IPA written in by hand and decided it was time to create a how-to for using IPA on their computers. We also added a page for cool links, and Professor Rob's site totally qualifies. Here we are:
http://ipa4linguists.pbwiki.com
johj (at) pdx (dot) edu
I knew this post would generate a comment.
Thanks for the news, johj. It's always nice to hear that the spectrogram site is appreciated.
I forgot to mention, as re my loathing of banana slugs, those huge holes on the sides of their heads (necks?). I think they breathe through them, but now I wonder if they're, um, reproductive in nature. But their weird. Euuww.
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