04 January 2011

Tuesday Crustie: Not confused, just complex


The peppermint shrimp (Lysmata wurdemanni) made New Scientist’s “coolest animals of 2010” list. Why? As they detail here, this species is a protandric simultaneous hermaphrodite. In other words, they can start life as a male, then develop female sex organs, so they become male and female simultaneously. The technical paper is here.

Photo by Miguelverdu on Wikipedia. Used under a Creative Commons license.

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