What a milestone in gay history today has been! Not only did we mark the official end of the U.S. military's oppressive, anti-gay Don't Ask Don't Tell policy—but also it turns out this species of squid has weird gay sex all the time!

Now, before you applaud the bold coming-out of Octopoteuthis deletron ("A five-and-a-half-inch deep-sea squid that lives a solitary life up to half a mile down in the dark waters of the Pacific Ocean"—sounds like my love life!), be aware that technically it's not gay or bisexual, according to researcher Hendrik J.T. Hoving. It "has no discernible sexual orientation and... has nothing to do with human behavior" (sounds like my love life!). But the fact remains: Male squids are bisexual sluts.

Male squid, for example, pay no attention to the sex of other squid. Understandably so. They live alone in the dark, males and females are hard to tell apart , and only occasionally do squids pass in the night. Far better to risk wasting a few million sperm than to miss out on a chance to reproduce.

Sounds like my love life! Other same-sex animal pairings have been documented; some insects, for example, "engage in traumatic insemination" (sounds like my love life!). But Octopoteuthis deletron is the first "among the spineless masses of invertebrates known to mate equally with males and females," as documented by Dr. Hoving in a new paper called "A Shot in the Dark: Same-Sex Sexual Behavior in a Deep-Sea Squid." And how, exactly, do the squids mate?

Little is known about the details but it seems that the male ejaculates a packet of sperm at the mating partner, and the packet turns inside out, essentially shooting the sperm contained in a membrane into the flesh of the partner, where they stay embedded until the female (if the shooter has been lucky) is ready to fertilize its eggs. If males are the recipient of these rocket sperm, they are just stuck with them.

Sounds like my love life! The whole thing. Sounds exactly like my love life. Weird!

[NYT]