Yin and yan all in one piece

We'd like to think that our gender/sex/whatever lies behind the stating that "it takes two to tango" is someting essential ever since we became a sperm&egg hybrid. Well, you could say that it is like that on the paper but nature can't really read. There are therefore several interesting "neither male nor female" cases both in cell way (such as Klinefelter syndrome, Triple X syndrome, XYY syndrome, Turner syndrome and so on) and in body way (hermaphroditism and ovotestism). There's nothing wrong with individuals having these so called "symptoms", other than that they fall out of what we preceive as being normal. As if anyone were...

Anyway! There's more beautiful examples found in nature of how unspecific gender determination could be. One goes under the term "gynandromorphism". It basically means that in a specimen you can find both male and female characteristics. This has been found in moths as well as in some lobsters. Take a look at the claws of the crab in the upper picture and you can see that one side shows female features whereas the other show male features.

There are two possibilities in this "condition": the sex differences can either be separated in two sides of the individual (called "bilateral gynandromorphism") or be mosaic.


Images revised from: http://www.daltonstate.edu/galeps/images/jpegs/Papilionidae/Pa%20glaucus%20gynandromorph2.jpg http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/dual%20sex%20moth%20NHM.JPG

Even if they have male and female characteristics, they are unable to use them for reproductive purposes. This, I suppose, is a way of preventing the possibility for the ultimate incestous mating to happen (self-fertilization, that is) since this isn't really a good thing if you're not a flower.

I also found a site stating that they have a gynandromorphic finch! Read about it here.


Sources:
http://www.lobsters.org/ldoc/ldocpage.php?did=436 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gynandromorph