Not like the name. Like… you know. The squid the New York Times says are ready to get it on, however they can get it:
But for sheer amazement, the mating behavior of the squid, Octopoteuthis deletron, has to rank near the top. And the same-sex part is the least of it.
For the record, Octopoteuthis is the first among the spineless masses of invertebrates known to mate equally with males and females, Hendrik J.T. Hoving and two colleagues report in their paper, “A shot in the dark: same-sex sexual behavior in a deep-sea squid,” published, lurid title and all, in Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biology Letters. No surprise given its life in the deep.
The way the squid mate is something else. 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. It is the kind of mating that would make a good video game.
And the visible evidence of those embedded sperm is what allowed Dr. Hoving and his co-authors to document the squid’s mating choices.
Remember, if you will, that squid also are possessed of a rather prodigious endowment.