Sex in the Wild (a First-Hand Account)
What I learned about love from a hermaphrodite, a cannibal, and a dizzyingly diverse array of sea creatures.
by Eva Hayward
posted Jan 30, 2013
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/what-would-nature-do/sex-in-the-wildInvertebrates, or as biologists call them, "inverts," like the nudibranch are critters liberated from the constraints of a backbone. They offer a particularly rich resource for examining the limits of sex and sexuality. Consider the limpet, a snail-like hermaphrodite that undergoes sex change during its life. It is born sexless, then matures into a male at nine months. After a couple of years, he becomes female. These little conical beings, no bigger than poker chips, deliciously pervert and invert our human assumptions about bodies.
In general, we pretend sex is obvious, as if our chromosomes calculate our entire physiology. But as we've slowly come to realize—with the help of feminism, "queer theory," and biology—sex is many processes that include X and Y chromosomes, hormones, gonads, internal sex structures, and external genitalia, as well as history, culture, environment, and variables still to be named. Some marine inverts "know" that sex is a process; know it as part of their way of life.
Which is not to call nudibranch or limpet reproduction "queer." Sex change isn't queer for these organisms; it's their norm. Unlike some queer humans, they are not challenging sex, gender, and sexual conventions. Humans also change sexes, but oysters and humans change in vastly different biological contexts, specific to their environments and capacities.
