Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

The comic opens with a news report about a real environmental phenomenon: rising ocean temperatures are altering turtle reproduction such that the vast majority of turtle offspring are female. (In many reptile species, the sex of offspring is determined by the temperature at which eggs incubate, a process called temperature-dependent sex determination.) A man watching the news reacts with alarm -- "What? But that means..." and "Oh my god!" -- and rushes out in a panic.

The reader is led to believe the man is alarmed by the ecological disaster this represents. He races to the ocean, jumps on a boat, and heads out shouting "Noooo! I am too late!" But the punchline subverts expectations: he arrives to find a sign reading "Welcome to Utopia." The nearly all-female turtle population has apparently created a perfect society.

The Humor

The joke plays on a bait-and-switch. The setup makes the reader assume the man is panicking about environmental catastrophe, but the punchline reveals he is upset because the turtles beat him to creating a female-dominated utopia (or alternatively, that he wanted to get there before it became a utopia and it is "too late" to stop it). The absurdist humor lies in the idea that removing males from a population automatically results in paradise -- a playful riff on the battle-of-the-sexes trope. The joke also works because it takes a genuinely concerning ecological fact and spins it in a completely unexpected direction.

References

The comic references the real phenomenon of temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD) in sea turtles. Studies have shown that rising global temperatures due to climate change are indeed skewing sex ratios heavily toward females in some sea turtle populations. A 2018 study of green sea turtles on the Great Barrier Reef found that in warmer northern nesting beaches, females outnumbered males by at least 116 to 1.