September 2, 2005, 12:19am

We talked a lot about Piaget in the develomental class discussion. He studied biology and was particularly interested in mollusks before his studies in child development.

Well, I did kept several mollusks when I was study F.5 biology. I wated to see if I could make an equilibrium -- ecosystem -- in a sealed glass jar. Obviously I failed because the mollusks turned out to eat so much weeds and more...

Anyways, I kept them long enough that they layed eggs -- bright red, very frightening color. They made hundreds or thousands of eggs at one time. Most of the eggs matured but the big mollusks ate their own babies.

I still can't figure out why. If evolution theory is correct, how can this creature survive when they don't even recognize their own babies and eat them? It's even more terrible if they indeed recognize their own offsprings and decide to eat them anyways. If this is the case, they should extinct.

You see, it's usually seen as a product of evolution that human babies are born so cute in adults' eyes. They have to be cute to attract adults and adults have to be attracted to babies so that the species go on.

The baby mollusks were very cute in my eyes. They're only 2mm in length and the shell was so thin that they're transparent.

The other thing about the mollusks that struck me was that, they layed eggs but I still don't know how they made it. The volume of eggs was like half of their body size. I didn't see any hole in them for the eggs to come out. I'm sure a hole must be there but I just couldn't see it.

I was so puzzled that I looked into books but only found that some mollusks were asexual and others are hermaphrodite. I didn't remember seeing any anatomy of mollusks showing their sexual organs anyways and I'm never into dissection. So, this remains a mystery to me.

So, that could be how I began my interest in gender. Just a coincident that I happened to have a similar taste with Piaget. Just weird.