On 4.7 year olds & Barnacle Genitals

My 4.7 year old son has taken an interest to all things tidal. That is, he totally digs wandering over to a beach and checking out the various critters that live in the tide pools. So far, we have checked out the purple sea urchins, fed snails to big green sea anemones, scared crabs, barked at sea lions, and examined big piles of barnacles like the one pictured to the left.

Of course, this has led to further research in an effort to satiate the insatiable curiosity of our son. My wife was hanging out with Roger when he asked about various sea creatures that he had seen. Including barnacles. So, she did what has become natural in the last decade and looked up barnacles via Google.

The first article is an informative little bit of research material out of Australia. As they were reading the article, we were all quite surprised to learn that [barnacle] males having proportionately probably the largest penis in the animal kingdom.

An interesting bit of trivia, certainly. Even more interesting was the ensuing bit of conversation with 4.7 year old explaining just exactly what that means.

The things you learn on the Internets.

Update: Turned off comments for this post. Seems the stupid spambots had zeroed in on this one post as the spot to spam my comments. Spammers suck.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 27th, 2005 at 10:32 pm and is filed under Life, Nature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.