One of the many benefits of being a chronic insomniac is that I have, through the years, been fortunate enough to witness the manner by which numerous living things on this planet create more of their own. For this, I owe a great deal of thanks to the 1:00 - 4:00 a.m. documentary programming schedules on the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel, the Playboy Channel, Animal Planet, and similar networks.

Last night, I added a new species to the list of strange animal porn I have witnessed. After waking up around 1:00 a.m. and being unable to get back to sleep, I padded down the hall to add to my encyclopedic knowledge of animal mating habits and learned a great deal about the life cycle of the lowly Sea Squirt.

Sea Squirts, I learned, are one of the numerous creatures which live most of their lives anchored in one place at the bottom of the ocean. They derived their name from the fact that when they're disturbed, they squirt water out of the two openings - one of which is a mouth-like thing, and the other of which is another mouth-like thing - on their bodies.

Since they're immobile and live in an environment where stuff floats around them, they've developed the same reproductive method as most other such creatures, namely that they squirt sperm out into the water around them in the hopes that they'll land on another member of their species and make little Sea Squirt babies. In fact, it's amazing how many species breed this way.

As an aside, during my nocturnal sex ed sessions, I've learned that there are so many undersea species that breed this way, I often wonder how shallow the ocean would be if all the wiggly little seedlings were removed. My guess is that it wouldn't be too hard to skip a stone from Brazil to Africa. The ocean's so full of little fishy sperm swimming hither and yon that even if there were no waves, it would still jiggle like Jell-O. I mention this solely in case any of my readers planning a beach vacation are particularly squeamish about swimming in this kind of stuff. Or are particularly fertile, for that matter. Be safe and go to the mountains instead.

Last night's educational foray into the life cycles of the Sea Squirt made me aware of many similarities to our own mating rituals.

Think about it.

Human families are really just groups of people who have ended up living together as a result of squirting stuff into and out of each other.

There are many variants to this, but in the traditional situation, two humans who decide they want to squirt exclusively with one another will have a ceremony to solemnize that decision. Many of them - though they're not supposed to - squirt with each other prior to the ceremony, and many even squirt with a lot of people before settling on one person with whom they wish to keep squirting exclusively.

At this ceremony, someone whom God put in charge of hooking up squirting couples will read some stuff from a book called The Holy Bible and then ask each, in essence, "Do you want to squirt with him/her exclusively?" If each answers affirmatively, the divine appointee will declare them bound to one another and then say to the male, again in essence, "You may squirt your bride, but only with your mouth on hers for now because, you know, God's looking and it would be a little rude to do much more at this point."

Then they go off to a big party where the female will toss a grouping of flowers - an organism with its own brand of squirting - into a crowd of other females as a superstitious gesture of good fortune that the one who catches it will be the next to find someone with whom to exclusively squirt. Then the male and female (the two involved in the ceremony) will smear cake all over each other's faces while many of the people who were watching the ceremony get intoxicated as a prelude to flirting and eventually pairing off and surreptitiously finding a place to unofficially squirt with one another.

Afterwards, the ceremonial male and female will retire to a hotel room somewhere where they will begin squirting for the first (at least official) time. The next day, they will awaken and travel to some distant place and enjoy squirting with each other for a few weeks, then return to the place where, like the Sea Squirt, they'll be anchored for the rest of their lives.

They'll continue to squirt with one another until finally, one day, the stuff squirted will end up being squirted on a thing that makes other humans when squirted. Roughly nine months after that happens, the female will then squirt out another human.

They are allowed to do this more than once. In fact, each human female will squirt out approximately two and a half new humans during her lifetime. No one's quite sure what happens to the other half of the last one, though.

And there you have it. From the lowly Sea Squirt to the infinitely more complex human being, creatures everywhere have their own way of squirting out more of their kind.

Some, though, don't make more of themselves by squirting. Instead, they just split, which is what human couples do when one of them discovers the other squirting with someone they're not supposed to, but that's a different topic for a different day.