Bringing Sexy Back

How do humans rate in the love game compared to the animals? Are we no better than animals or are animals more human than we think? Do animals try just as hard to mate as we do? Are they romantic? How do they attract the opposite (or in some cases, the same) sex? Do animals ever find true love or are they serial daters?

I have unearthed some fascinating facts on what creatures of nature do when they don’t think we are watching.

Who says Cupid only pierces the human heart? It also takes part in the mating ritual of the hermaphrodite garden snail helix aspersa. One snail courts the other by circling it for 15 minutes to six hours, touching tentacles and biting at each other’s lips and genitals. Pressure builds in snail A’s genitals, which houses a "love dart." When snail B touches snail A’s genitals, it gets punctured with the dart, which can measure up to an inch-and-a-half long. The other snail fires back, each dart releasing a chemical preventing the snail from digesting the sperm.

Male lynx spiders capture the heart and body of the female by wrapping her in the finest silk - then she falls for him by getting tangled in his web. When he unwraps her, he treats her to a feast of insects as he has his way with her.

Flatworms participate in, "penis fencing." The first one to stab the other with its penis injects sperm; the other lays eggs.

The male praying mantis approaches a female, flapping his wings, swaying his abdomen and leaps onto her back to mate. The female mantis not only will rip the head off her mate after sex, but sometimes she will eat it during the act. Despite losing his head, he is usually able to finish what he started.

Bower birds are great builders. While it's common for most male birds to attract females with elaborate visual signals like peacocks, who fan their feathers, the bower birds of Australia and New Guinea take a practical approach. Male bower birds carefully craft elaborate structures, cleverly called bowers, to attract a mate. Using everything from leaves, sticks, feathers, paper, cellophane and glass, these birds can even construct sturdy tunnels, towers and archways.

Squid mating begins with a "circling nuptial dance," where teams of squid continuously circle around spawning beds. At daybreak, the squid begins to mate and continue all day long, halting the activity only long enough for the female to dive down and deposit her eggs. Once she comes back to the circling area, she reunites with her male companion and the process begins again.

White-fronted parrots may be the only species (besides humans) to engage in the act of "kissing." Before mating, the male and female birds will lock beaks and gently flick their tongues together. The male will regurgitate food for his mate in a generous show of affection. They generally lay a solitary egg, with both the male and the female taking turns incubating it. Once the chick hatches, both parents feed and care for it.

When a female garter snake emerges from hibernation, she releases a pheromone that attracts hundreds of male snakes in the vicinity to rush her and create a large squirming "mating ball." Like many snakes, the male garter snake has two penises, called "hemipenes," on each side of its body. The male will try to use the best-positioned penis to mate with the female in the center of the mating ball. The male snakes pile themselves on top of each other trying to reach breeding females and end up crushing the female participants to death.

When the female rattle snake is ready to breed, male snakes engage in violent dance battles to achieve supremacy over potential rivals while the winning snake will continue to dance in order to seduce the female.

Though most geese prefer to form lifelong partnerships with members of the opposite sex, numerous males just aren't interested in the female. These geese end up developing romantic alliances with their fellow male geese. Some females who still want a family will interrupt the homosexual romps in order to be "accidentally" fertilized.

To induce her to sexual maturity, a queen bee is selectively bred in a special "queen cell" in the hive and fed royal jelly by worker bees. A virgin queen that survives to adulthood without being killed by her rivals will take a mating flight with a dozen or so male drones (out of tens of thousands) whose genitals will explode and snap off inside the queen.

The male frigatebird can inflate his throat sac into a giant red heart-shaped balloon. Then he engages moving his head form side to side and shaking his wings to attract the females. A female frigatebird will mate with the male with the biggest and shiniest balloon. During sex, the male bird will sweetly put his wings over her eyes to make sure she doesn’t get distracted by other males with even nicer balloons.

Penguin couples spend their lives apart from each other and meet once a year in late March, after traveling as far as 70 miles (112 km) inland to reach the breeding site. They look for their mates by making a bugling call. Once they find one another, they stand breast to breast, repeatedly bow to each other and bugle.

Like in most birds, penguins have no external genitalia. The male’s sperm is produced in the testes and stored in his cloaca. The female also has a cloaca that leads to the ovaries.

Once the egg is laid, the female Emperor Penguin transfers it very carefully to her mate (if the egg touches the ice, it would freeze and die), who then keeps the egg warm by tucking it under a large fold of skin until it hatches. The female penguin immediately returns to the sea to feed, leaving the male without food for two months. When she returns, she finds her mate (and chick) by listening to one particular bugle over thousands other.

Emperor Penguins are serially monogamous - for that breeding season, they only have one mate. However, if they can’t find one another the next season (and most can’t - only about 15% of pairs find each other in subsequent year, and just 5% in the third year) they will choose new mates.

Male dolphins have a swiveling, retractable and prehensile penis. In fact, a male dolphin can use his penis to explore objects just like a hand. Male dolphins also have a very strong sex drive. It can mate many, many times in a day.

Clownfish live in a group consisting of a breeding pair of male and female, as well as some non-breeding males. There is strict hierarchy based on size: the largest is the female, next largest is the male, and then the non-breeding males. If the female dies, the male will change sex and become the female. Then the largest of the non-breeding males will become the breeding male.

At one time, zookeepers had trouble getting pandas raised in captivity to breed. The pandas showed little interest in sex - that is until someone at the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding and Research Base in Sichuan Province, China, had the bright idea of showing them steamy videos of panda sex as part of their initiation rites.

To determine who gets to mate, male Galapagos giant tortoises will rise on their legs and stretch their necks. The taller tortoise gets to mate. The victor attracts a female by bellowing and bobbing his head furiously. He is ecstatic after finding a mate because that means he is no longer a 40 year old virgin - that’s how long it takes to reach sexual maturity. Mating can last for hours, during which the male grunts and roars loudly.

A whiptail lizard’s reproduction is proceeded by pseudo copulation, where two females act out the roles of a male mounting a female (they switch roles later on.) Apparently, this is required to stimulate egg production in both lizards. When the eggs hatch, they will be all female clones of the mother lizard.

Monogamy is so rare in the animal world that only 3-5 % of the mammals are known to form lifelong pair bonds, like beavers, otters, jackals, foxes, some bats and a few dwarf deer and antelopes. Creatures that do pair for life, occasionally have flings on the side and some, like the wolf, do not mourn a death or an former partner.

Staying faithful is extremely hard for animals, as the males are programmed to spread their genes and females want the best genes from the best males for their young.

Animals regarded as symbols of faithfulness, such as gibbons and swans, are now known to cheat, abandon and even "divorce" one other like humans. The male stork is faithful to the nest rather than to the female, and he won't protect her if another female fights with her for the nest.

The few animals that do stick together have the biological basis of fidelity. In the prairie vole, a male vole will prefer to mate exclusively with the first female in which he loses his virginity and he will attack other females who try and breach his union.

The mating call of alligators resembles the boom of a cannon. Even alligators sometimes cannot tell the difference. Females often do not eat 8 to 9 weeks prior to mating. The male, recognizing the onset of the fertility period by a scent which she emits, makes the first overtures. He rubs his body against hers, raises his tail out of the water, grabs her neck with his jaws, and hooks his tail about hers in order to position himself to mate.

Indian pythons have been known to copulate for an amazing 180 days. Compare that with bulls of some species that can only keep it up for one second!

Oysters not only change sex frequently, but can impregnate and be impregnated just one week apart.