{"id":5701,"date":"2026-10-22T17:12:02","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T17:12:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/?p=5701"},"modified":"2026-10-22T17:12:31","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T17:12:31","slug":"transitions-between-hermaphroditism-and-gonochorism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/22\/transitions-between-hermaphroditism-and-gonochorism\/","title":{"rendered":"Transitions between hermaphroditism and gonochorism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Gonochorism is a fancy word for the sorts of individual sexes that humans have: &#8216;there are two sexes and each individual organism is either male or female&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>What struck my attention:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Two papers from 2008 have suggested that transitions between hermaphroditism and gonochorism or vice versa have occurred in animals between 10 and 20 times.<sup id=\"cite_ref-15\" class=\"mw-ref reference\" data-mw=\"{&quot;name&quot;:&quot;ref&quot;,&quot;attrs&quot;:{},&quot;body&quot;:{&quot;id&quot;:&quot;mw-reference-text-cite_note-15&quot;}}\"><a id=\"mwdQ\" title=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Gonochorism#cite_note-15\"><span id=\"mwdg\" class=\"mw-reflink-text\"><span id=\"mwdw\" class=\"cite-bracket\">[<\/span>15<span id=\"mweA\" class=\"cite-bracket\">]<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/sup> In a 2017 study involving 165 taxon groups, more evolutionary transitions from gonochorism to hermaphroditism were found than the reverse.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Also interesting: in humans and most species, sex is (almost entirely) genetically determined, but that isn&#8217;t always true; &#8216;for example, alligators use temperature-dependent sex determination during egg incubation.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>I really wish humans had the (non-medical) option of sequential hermaphroditism; I would love to try changing sex!<\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Gonochorism<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gonochorism is a fancy word for the sorts of individual sexes that humans have: &#8216;there are two sexes and each individual organism is either male or female&#8217;. What struck my attention: Two papers from 2008 have suggested that transitions between hermaphroditism and gonochorism or vice versa have occurred in animals between 10 and 20 times.[15] [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-1tX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5701"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5704,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5701\/revisions\/5704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}