After sharing this video on Facebook, someone asked me if the ad was real, so I decided to do a little research. The ad was inspired by Humpback Acoustic Research Collaboration (HARC), collaborative project between researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Australia’s Defence Science and Technology Organization (DSTO), and the University of Queensland (UQ).  The goal of HARC is to investigate how whales interact with the environment in the presence of anthropogenic noise.

Male humpback whales are known for the ‘love songs’ that they compose to serenade the females. Each composition contains up to 20 vocalizations, which are combined to make a unique song that can last hours, and the song evolves throughout the singing season.

The Whale Song project for Optus was led by Noise Creative Director Bruce Heald, who used musicians familiar with their instruments to perform element of real whale songs that could be recognizably musical to humans. He then composed a song that would demonstrate the possible overlap in what humans and whales might consider beautiful music.

This has got to be one of the coolest projects I have ever seen! Kudos to all those involved.

I think I have the nerd infection.  As I am writing you, I am in lobster pajama pants and an African bush prints t-shirt.  I wish I had a pair of fish pants.  I’m pretty sure I’ve had the infection for awhile, the Nerdicus contagium maritimus variety.  I attended Zoo Camp at the Bronx Zoo as a child, and spent several summers at Seacamp in Big Pine Key, Florida.

I’m pretty sure I have been to seven zoos and 17 aquariums.  In fact, I’ve seen the world’s only two live kelp exhibits (one at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, and one at the Two Oceans Aquarium in South Africa).

I am either a joy or a nightmare to take to an aquarium.  If you want to learn, then I am your girl, as I can identify 90-something percent of Caribbean reef fish and know facts about many of them.  If you like to speed through an aquarium….well, you would probably flee.  My cousin is guilty of having done this.

In fact, I am definitely an aquarium bum.  I interned at the Florida Aquarium, and logged over 270 hours in under 6 months.  If I wasn’t at class, I was at the aquarium!

I have pet penguins, been spit on by a walrus, been grabbed by an octopus, and have had fish or shrimp and their juices in my hair, on more than one occasion.  I’ve owned fish (freshwater and saltwater), hamsters, guinea pigs, frogs, lizards, snakes, cats and dogs….what can I say?  I love animals.

Nearly every place I have travelled (Caymans, Grenadines, Fiji, South Africa) has been because of a desire to see the natural world of that country.  All of the places I want to go (Tanzania, Great Barrier Reef, Belize, etc) are because I want to explore the environment there.

My bookcase speaks for itself:

In fact, I got so excited when I saw the “Little Book of Pandemics” book, I’m certain if there was video footage of that moment, the diagnosis would be very fast.

My TV habits also tend to veer more towards the sciences as well…CSI, Eleventh Hour, Bones and NCIS are my favorite shows!  I have crushes on fictional characters from many of these shows….Greg Sanders, Dr. Jacob Hood, Timothy McGee.  And I would definitely be friends with Abby Sciuto and Dr. Temperance Brennan!

My nerd-love extends into my real life too.  I have developed crushes based on the fact that someone was a fish-nerd.  Nerds are hot!!!

Please report back quickly, as I hope to be diagnosed as soon as possible.

Sincerely,

Allie Wilkinson

P.S.  I think my friend Christie is infected as well. After all, she started this site.

The male banana slug’s penis is the same size as his body, so he needs to find a female the same size as himself.  Otherwise, his penis is too big for her and she chews it off.

Porcupines

Female porcupines are only interested in sex for 8-12 hours out of the
ENTIRE YEAR!  Males have to woo their woman by peeing all over her from 6 ft away.  If she’s into it, then she makes him mate over and over again, until he is exhausted.  If he’s done before she’s had enough, she leaves him for another male.

Bonobos

Everyone has sex with everyone else, for any reason at all.  ”Hey, you brought home fruit?  Let’s do it!”

Flatworms

Ah, the art of penis fencing.  Since flatworms are hermaphrodites, they duel to see who will be the male and who will be the female.  Whoever gets stabbed first by the penis gets to be the woman.

Cichlids

The males are definitely jerky in this species.  You see, the female carries her eggs around in her mouth.  The male has spots on his anal fin that look like eggs.  So the female, thinking she dropped some, moves in to pick up her “lost eggs” and in the process gets a faceful of sperm, compliments of the male.

Honeybees

Only around a dozen male drones get to mate with the queen bee out of a thousand or so, but their genitals explode and their broken-off penis acts as a cork to keep their sperm inside the queen.

Anglerfish

And here, you thought your boyfriend was a parasite!  Once the male anglerfish reaches maturity, his digestive system shuts down.  Since he can’t eat or digest food on his own, he finds a female, bites her and releases an enzyme that bonds them together permanently.  Voila!  No work required by the male, except for releasing sperm every now and then.

Brown antechinus

This little marsupial is so sex-crazed, that he will hump until he keels over and dies of exhaustion.  He will spend up to 12 hours mating with one female.  YIKES!  Insatiable to the core, he goes from female to female, mating until his immune system becomes suppressed, he develops severe ulcers and gets infected by parasites and dies at the end of the mating season.

Hyenas

Talk about dominant women!  The female hyenas are more aggressive than their male counterparts, and are even equipped with a pseudopenis (basically a realllly large clitoris).  The males then have to artfully insert their penis into the pseudopenis in order to mate.

Percula clownfish

In a family group, the largest member is the female and the second-largest is the male.  When the female dies, the male then switches sex and becomes the female of the family.

Snails

Snails are also hermaphrodites.  Strange fact: their penis is located on their neck!  As cracked.com put it, even though they have both parts, they still need a mate because snails, like Jesus, frown on self-love.  Instead they stab each other with calcium “love darts” to convince their partner to trade sperm packets.

Pandas

Panda porn.  Got to see some of that at the 2007 SCB conference, while sitting with my dad. AWKWARD.  It’s no secret that zookeepers have had issues breeding pandas in the past.  Now pandas of a certain age are shown “panda porn” to get them in the mood.

Hippos

The male hippo will put himself on display, defecate on himself and use his tail like a propeller to spread it around, in the hopes of attracting  a mate.

Red-sided garter snakes

The female ends up in a giant snake orgy called a mating ball, which can consist of up to 100 males all trying to mate with the one female.  It’s a big tourist attraction up in Manitoba, Canada.

Argentine lake duck

This duck has a 17 inch long, corkscrew-shaped penis, with a brush on its end.  It uses the brush to remove any sperm left by a previous male.  And if its female tries to escape, he uses his penis as a lasso to bring her back.

Whiptail lizards

These guys aren’t guys at all.  None of them are.  They are ALL females.  How do they reproduce, you ask?  They engage in a little girl-on-girl humping to encourage the female to reproduce on her own and produce an exact clone of herself.

Bedbugs

The phrase “traumatic insemination” says it all.  Male bedbugs have such sharp penises, that they basically just stab through the female’s body to deposit their sperm.

Sea hares

Yet another hermaphrodite, sea hares will form a line or circle, one upon the next, to mate.

Argonauts

Also known as the paper nautilus, this is a species of octopus.  The male  produces a ball of spermatozoa in a special tentacle called a hectocotylus.  When he sees a female he likes, the male then detaches his penis to swim by itself to the female!

Hectocotylus (Image Credit: Julian Finn, Macalogist)

This detachable swimming penis was actually first noted by an Italian naturalist back in the 1800s, who mistook it for a parasitic worm!

Its a matter of size

Here’s some info you wouldn’t expect.  Barnacles have the longest penis to body ratio in the entire animal kingdom.  The penis can be up to 50 times the size of its owner!  Yet gorillas, which can weigh up to 450 lbs or so, have penises less than 2 inches long!  Stranger yet: the world’s longest sperm actually belongs to fruit fly of the Drosophila bifurca species.  Once uncoiled, a single sperm measures 2 inches long, which is 1,000 times the size of human sperm!