Yellow Mongooses mating, image c/o Wikimedia Commons

It’s sex week on The Loom. Carl Zimmer has a stack of papers on the evolution of sex that need blogging, so he will be covering the topic all week long.  Now, if you haven’t read any of  his stuff on sex, you may want to begin by delving into the world of kinky duck sex.  I owe Carl a special thank you for his Science Online 2010 discussion on duck genitalia, for it not, I may not have been the fasted tweeter in the South to respond to a trivia question regarding the shape of a duck’s penis, and thereby would never have won a copy of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (which, by the way, is a FANTASTIC read!)

We then decided to do a little beach hopping.  I’m not sure which beach was really the “event” for the day.  It could be Le Galion, a family-friendly, protected beach.  I managed to snorkel a little because the water was so calm, but there wasn’t much to see.  There were TONS of windsurfers and kiteboarders, which was AWESOME to watch, in addition to a really cool, big, seagrass-covered sandbar where you could watch the incoming waves from the bay die out.  And for my geology fans, yes, they had beachrock.  If you are looking for a party, this is the place.  the locals set up generators with great music as they have their own private BBQs, but it definitely gets your feet moving.

As for the other “event” of the day…We went to Baie Orientale, the island’s most popular beach.  The further south you go, the less and less beachwear you will see, as the southernmost point of the beach is home to a nudist resort.  Yet even on the north end, BOY did I get an eyeful!  You see, we had just parked the car.  There was a man driving the wrong way on the one-way parking lot road, smiling and looking at me.  He had on no pants.  I figured okay weird, he is driving in a speedo.  Nope, no speedo either.  And one hand was on his ahem, gearshift.  NOT what you are expecting from a day at the beach.  Maybe it’s some cultural difference for which I missed the memo….WARNING!

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!