this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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The "nature only has two sexes" crowd obviously never heard of Schizophyllum commune which has thousands
Or any of the fishes that can transition from one gender to another.
Which is so hella cool
And some frogs and shit can too
Nature is fuckin wild
Just wait until they hear about bees!
What about bees? I didn't know they had any sex changing or multiple different sexes, only that the males only existed for mating with the queen and then die
I'm no expert, but here's a Wikipedia page about it:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_bee_life_cycle
And a more in-depth/easy to read article:
https://askentomologists.com/2015/08/05/honeybee-genetics-how-do-they-work/
TL;DR: All fertilized eggs become female bees. Whether a fertilized egg becomes a worker or a queen is based completely on how much royal jelly they are fed by other workers as larvae. Drones (male bees) are born from unfertilized eggs and only contain one set of chromosomes.
Also, there are reptiles that change sex based on the temperature in which their eggs develop. Sex gets weird in the animal kingdom.
The extent of their education would appear to end at kindergarten.
I swear the more I learn about biology the more it looks like people are riding by the seat of their pants
And their pants are so much more advanced than my pants it melts my brain
Science man says really cool and confusing shit
"You've dedicated your life to this bro, you know more than I could fathom on the topic, I believe you bro"
I'm absolutely a trans ally but what I don't understand about how science defines the sexes without reproduction. If those mushrooms have thousands of sexes, must they participate in gigantic fungal orgies every time they reproduce? Of course given that fungi are in an entirely different kingdom than mammals, I wouldn't be surprised if how sexes are defined is entirely different and irrelevant to how they're defined in animals.
My biology education ended at high school and unfortunately it was a high school that taught that the earth was 6000 years old so to say it was lacking would be an understatement.
Basically for these fungi, only different "sexes" can reproduce with each other. Still only need two for reproduction. They can't reproduce with the same sex. So A can mate with B, C, D, etc. A can't mate with A. Do dna sequencing on a few that you know can mate with one another and you can find where the sex allele/gene is. Then you can sequence the population at large to see how many different sex alleles there are. You can confirm or do old school observation to see which ones can reproduce with another.
Intersex Chickens.