weird sex
Sex is an evolution booster. Two mutated genomes combining into a growing embryo? Hello new body shapes, organs, limbs and support structures. Scales can turn into feathers and fur. Fins can turn into feet. Play around with the right genes during embryonic development and you can turn a modern animal into its predecessor to prove an evolutionary lineage.
We’re used to sex as something that comes after flowers, dinner and a whole lot of flirting or a rather unfortunate consequence of a lapse in judgment. We think we’re so incredibly creative with our porn and books filled with a myriad of positions for coitus, but a quick tour through the animal kingdom shows that when it comes to bizarre mating, nature beats us by a long shot.
Take hermaphrodites for example. For these creatures gender doesn’t exist. They’re both male and female at the same time and when they can’t find a mate, they just let their male and female parts have a go at it. Besides being a hell of a masturbatory experience, it can actually produce an offspring. When times are good and partners are abound, hermaphroditic sea slugs mate in chains of three, one partner for each type of reproductive organ. If they’re feeling frisky, they’ll even mate in a quintet.
Speaking of group mating, some snakes mate in swarms where males can outnumber females ten to one, not unlike the ratio of men to women at an average college party. Or how about a twist like seven female koalas trying to mount each other while waving off sex starved males? Don’t pity the male koalas though. Unlike some of their aquatic and insect counterparts, they don’t have to lose their limbs or their heads to get a little love.
Male paper nautili actually have to shoot their reproductive arms filled with sperm packets into females like a fighter jet on an attack pattern. Bee drones usually have their genitals torn out of their abdomens after they mate with a queen. Mantis males can become snacks for their mates, much like some male spiders which try to mate with the much larger females while being eaten. If I were a male spider, I’d seriously think about lifelong celibacy, but celibacy just isn’t done in nature.
For example, you’d think that if all the males in your species go extinct, it’s party over, right? No more sex. Just try telling that to the all-female whiptail lizards. When a whiptail wants to self-fertilize, another female will mount her as if she was a male and stimulate her partner into completing the fertilization process. The whiptail will then lay an egg which will hatch a viable offspring to repeat the cycle.
Finally, what discussion of sex in the natural world would be complete without mentioning the species that defies sexual excess, the bonobos? Even the busiest porn stars have nothing on these evolutionary cousins of ours. The bonobos treat sex the same way we treat hugs and handshakes. They also have oral sex, sex in multiple positions and kiss each other during the act. And I’m sure there’s a study which shows that they’re also aroused by porn.
After even a cursory glance at all the strange mating habits in the natural world, it seems that humans are some of the tamest, most boring sexually reproducing species around. So the next time a dour and very important looking person on the news rants about how perverted and sexually deviant we are, it’s a fair question to ask “compared to what?”
