On Wednesday, December 01, 1999 7:29 PM Michael M. Butler
butler@comp-lib.org wrote:
> It's also worthy of note that all known species of cephs have *really*
> short lifespans by human lights.
> Senescence/death appear to be plugged in to sexual maturity in cephs, more
> so than even, say, mustelids.
>
> So now, posit the ceph uplift requires extending their lifespan. If that
> were done to the germline and
> it got out into the world's ceph population somehow, what would the impact
> be? With, or without, changing
> their go-for-broke reproduction strategies (e.g., planktonic larvae in
some
> species)?
That would depend on whether they could interbreed with non-uplifted members of their species. I think it might be best to make for some sort of species isolation such that the uplifted member of a species is reproductively separate from the nonuplifted members. However, in practice, I do not know if anything we can do would make that possible given the ways octopodes have sex.
More to think about!
BTW, in the previous debate on this, one of the things I liked about octopodes was their speed of reproduction and the number of offspring. If, e.g., uplifting were to be made illegal, this would be a way to present the powers that be with a fait accompli -- i.e., an uplifted species that would be hard for them to isolate or root out. This is, of course, assuming that the uplifted species is not something that we would want to root out.:)
Cheers!
Daniel Ust
http://mars.superlink.net/neptune/