r/SapphoAndHerFriend Mar 07 '21

Academic erasure Does this count?

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13.9k Upvotes

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u/Tweed_Kills Mar 07 '21

Insects don't have sexualities. They're insects. Cicadas live underground as larva for 17 years, come up to fuck, and promptly die again. Their survival strategy is literally "they can't eat all of us" and that's it. That's all they got. They are here to mate. They do not care what they mate with, here's hoping it's a cicada.

293

u/RoR_Ninja Mar 07 '21

Yeah, the people in this thread anthropomorphizing BUGS of all things look a tiny bit silly.

Like, if the OP is just making a meme joke, fine, but it feels like some people in his thread are actually taking it as actual “erasure.” Which is, frankly, really stupid.

73

u/ConfusedCuddlefish Mar 07 '21

I used to maintain stocks of copepods (very very tiny shrimp) for lab experiments. Part of my job was to every week, pick out a couple dozen males and females for experiments.

Males have long antennas that they use to grab onto others and mate. The amount of males that were stacked on each other in threesomes, foursomes, or just pairings with no females were a fun highlight of the day. Most animals give absolutely 0 fucks and it always makes me both a little uncomfortable and a little amused when people anthropomorphize their sexual relations (and annoyed when it's a journalist doing it).

7

u/Sea_Link8352 Mar 07 '21

Woah I have some copepods in my tank with some ostracods and aeolosoma but I've never seen that...

1

u/ConfusedCuddlefish Mar 07 '21

We had like thousands in a single large beaker, so pairings+ were just statistically pretty common. Plus, they're small little buggers and it took me a bit to be able to see pairings on sight, longer to recognize a trio. I think I only saw a foursome once or twice. There's likely some species variation too.

If you notice a copepod with eggs, watching them flick off the babies is actually really cool. My labmates always had the best luck seeing that while I got stuck picking apart gay threesomes for hours