Sex organ parasites have trouble mating

• Autores: Joshua Rapp Learn
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3159, 2018, pág. 10
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Castrator pea crabs live up to their name. They reside in the sex organs of molluscs and stop them reproducing. But the pea crabs' odd lifestyle also makes it tricky for them to find a mate. To confirm this, Emiliano Ocampo of the National University of mar del Plata and his colleagues examined females using a scanning electron microscope. But they found the sex organs of juvenile females cannot store sperm. There have been observations of males leaving their hosts and wandering about. Ocampo says it is likely males do this to look for females. "The female lives inside the host and waits for the male pea crab to copulate with them," he says.