![]() Most of the time, you get weird mish-mashes of tissue that don’t look like male or female genitalia (h/t DaveMellert).” This bilateral sexual asymmetry is a form of gynandromophy, where an organism abnormally displays both male and female characteristics and is not to be confused with hermaphrodites which are organisms that have both male and female sexual reproductive organs. ![]() The genitalia of these individuals can vary from having “two complete sets of genitalia, one male, one female. Or more strikingly one eye is white and the other is red. And what’s even more peculiar, one half of the fly will be male with male specific structures like the sex comb and the other half is female. Every once in a while I’ll find a fruit fly where one half of its body is yellow and other half is brown–split right down the middle. I’ve seen something like this happen in Drosophila. Where have I seen something like this before? I paced around the lab a bit yesterday and it dawned on me. Take for instance this two-toned lobster that looks like only one half of it was cooked :Īs odd as this lobster looked initially, the more I looked at this picture the more familiar it seemed to me. For comparison, the rarest are albino lobsters, which occur at a rate of about 1 in 100 million whereas blue lobsters are more commonly found (~1 in 2 million).īut even stranger looking lobsters are lurking out there in our oceans. Calico-patterned lobsters are extremely rare, occuring about 1 in 30 million. Rather than being dunked into a pot of boiling water, Calvin is now on display at the New England Aquarium. Just ask Calvin the lobster whose calico-patterned shell spared it from dining table destiny. You could make a case for “looking weird” being an effective survival strategy.
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