Last night, I watched some of the Discovery Channel mini-series Life, narrated by Oprah Winfrey. I watched about two and a half hours of it, which was enough time to glean this:

Don’t ever swallow sea water ever again, ever.

And let me tell you why. The sea, while fascinating to those of us who rely on dry shelter and oxygen and the like, is really quite a dull place if you happen to actually live there. Gentle currents, minute temperature fluctuation, diatoms. That’s about it. And if you’re a fish, who is there to talk to? All the cool animals want to eat you, and everything else is a bivalve or some kind of slow-moving invertebrate. SNOOZE. FEST.

So, they mate. And mate. And mate. Good for them!

Unfortunately, marine animals aren’t equipped with a no-mess system for their procreation. Rather, they just sort of spray their haploid cells out willy-nilly and hope for the best. They seem to be doing fairly well, given how many of them there are down there.

Their number, though, brings me back to the original point: If there are billions of marine animals in the sea, and each of them is ejaculating wildy into the briny, then I think it makes mathematical sense to say that I am going to be sick. I’m sure some kind of statistics wizard could figure out just what percentage of ocean water is actually genetic material, but then I’d have to actually know, and that would just make things worse.

Alright. Well, thanks for reading! Enjoy your lunch, everybody!

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