Sick Ducks

I wanted to share this article that I discovered some time ago, before it disappears from the source.



Necrophilia among ducks ruffles research feathers
Donald MacLeod
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 8 March 2005 12.23 GMT



The strange case of the homosexual necrophiliac duck pushed out the boundaries of knowledge in a rather improbable way when it was recorded by Dutch researcher Kees Moeliker.

It may have ruffled a few feathers, but it earned him the coveted Ig Nobel prize for biology awarded for improbable research, and next week he will be recounting his findings to UK audiences on the Ig Nobel tour.

Ducks behave pretty badly, it seems. It is not so much that up to one in 10 of mallard couples are homosexual - no one would raise an eyebrow in the liberal Netherlands - but they regularly indulge in "attempted rape flights" when they pursue other ducks with a view to forcible mating. "Rape is a normal reproductive strategy in mallards," explains Mr Moeliker.

As he recounts in his seminal paper, The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard anas platyrhynchos, he was in his office in the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, when he was alerted by a bang to the fact a bird had crashed into the glass facade of the building. "I went downstairs immediately to see if the window was damaged, and saw a drake mallard (anas platyrhynchos) lying motionless on its belly in the sand, two metres outside the facade. The unfortunate duck apparently had hit the building in full flight at a height of about three metres from the ground. Next to the obviously dead duck, another male mallard (in full adult plumage without any visible traces of moult) was present. He forcibly picked into the back, the base of the bill and mostly into the back of the head of the dead mallard for about two minutes, then mounted the corpse and started to copulate, with great force, almost continuously picking the side of the head.

"Rather startled, I watched this scene from close quarters behind the window until 19.10 hours during which time (75 minutes) I made some photographs and the mallard almost continuously copulated his dead congener. He dismounted only twice, stayed near the dead duck and picked the neck and the side of the head before mounting again. The first break (at 18.29 hours) lasted three minutes and the second break (at 18.45 hours) lasted less than a minute. At 19.12 hours, I disturbed this cruel scene. The necrophilic mallard only reluctantly left his 'mate': when I had approached him to about five metres, he did not fly away but simply walked off a few metres, weakly uttering a series of two-note 'raeb-raeb' calls (the 'conversation-call' of Lorentz 1953). I secured the dead duck and left the museum at 19.25 hours. The mallard was still present at the site, calling 'raeb-raeb' and apparently looking for his victim (who, by then, was in the freezer)."

Mr Moeliker suggests the pair were engaged in a rape flight attempt. "When one died the other one just went for it and didn't get any negative feedback - well, didn't get any feedback," he said.

His findings have provoked a lot of interest - especially in Britain for some reason - but no other recorded cases of duck necrophilia. However, Mr Moeliker was informed of an American case involving a squirrel and a dead partner, although in this case it is not known whether the necrophilia observed was homosexual or not as the victim had been run over by a truck shortly before the incident.

The Sexiest Ape

Bonobo: Make Love Not War

Who said that violence is the only way to solve fights over food or territory? Instead of fighting, bonobos [wiki] have sex! Actually, their whole societal structure seems to revolve around sex.

Bonobos use sex as greetings, a mean of solving disputes, making up for fights, and as a favors in exchange for food. They tongue kiss, engage in oral sex, mutual masturbations, have face-to-face genital sex and even have a strange "penis fencing" ritual!

In their 1996 book titled Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson wrote:

"Chimpanzees and Bonobos both evolved from the same ancestor that gave rise to humans, and yet the Bonobo is one of the most peaceful, unaggressive species of mammals living on the earth today. They have evolved ways to reduce violence that permeate their entire society. They show us that the evolutionary dance of violence is not inexorable".


The more I read about Bonobo apes the more I wish that humans were like their ancestors.

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Fruit Bat Fellatio

Animals constantly provide sources of entertainment.

Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time

Oral sex is widely used in human foreplay, but rarely documented in other animals. Fellatio has been recorded in bonobos Pan paniscus, but even then functions largely as play behaviour among juvenile males. The short-nosed fruit bat Cynopterus sphinx exhibits resource defence polygyny and one sexually active male often roosts with groups of females in tents made from leaves. Female bats often lick their mate's penis during dorsoventral copulation. The female lowers her head to lick the shaft or the base of the male's penis but does not lick the glans penis which has already penetrated the vagina. Males never withdrew their penis when it was licked by the mating partner. A positive relationship exists between the length of time that the female licked the male's penis during copulation and the duration of copulation. Furthermore, mating pairs spent significantly more time in copulation if the female licked her mate's penis than if fellatio was absent. Males also show postcopulatory genital grooming after intromission.

Wanna see? It's a 2.9MB mpeg file of the bats

Rare Birds

Here is another fascinating mating ritual caught on camera: the Peruvian spatuletail hummingbird, described as about the size of a fluffy ping pong ball, has been filmed by the BBC in full for the first time.

A marvellous hummingbird display By Matt Walker Editor, Earth News

The spatuletail hummingbird is among the most rare and striking of birds. By using a high speed camera, a BBC natural history film crew was the first to capture the mating sequence in super slow motion. The crew also filmed a male advertising in front of a female, and solved a mystery of how the male birds make a snapping sound during the display.



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More Exploding Testicles

A willy warmer won't help these guys.



Spiders sacrifice genitals to ensure paternity
Friday, 9 March 2007

Sarah Bartlett
Cosmos Online

SYDNEY: Male wasp spiders allow part of their genitals to snap off and lodge in their female partner during sex - impeding other males attempts to mate with her.

The group of German researchers who conducted the study think that the males' behaviour means that their own sperm receives less competition for fertilising their partner’s eggs.

The males have to make their copulation count; female wasp spiders (Argiope bruennichi) usually end their 25-second sexual encounters by attacking and devouring the smaller male, meaning that he generally gets only one chance to pass on his genes.

Researchers had previously shown that 80 per cent of the time, males leave part of their genitals wedged in the females sexual orifice, said Gabriele Uhl of the University of Bonn.

But it had been unclear, she said, whether the spiders, native to central Europe, were simply hurrying to escape, or if their behaviour was a deliberate attempt to sabotage attempts to mate with further males later on.

Male spiders don't have a penis. Instead, they secrete semen into a mass of special silk, and then dip a form of specially adapted leg known as pedipalps into it. These pedipalps are used to transfer semen to the female during sex, and are the appendages that wasp spiders leave broken off in their partners.

By observing many spider matings in the laboratory, Uhl and her colleagues from Bonn and the University of Hamburg found thatwhether a males' genitals snapped off or not had no significant effect on his survival rate. But they found that it did make a significant difference on the success of subsequent matings.

When the pedipalps were left wedged in place in the female’s duct, subsequent matings were an average of just 8 seconds long - less than half the length of matings when the females were unimpeded. Additionally, males copulating with females whose ducts had been plugged were much less successful in breaking off their own genitals.

The team - who reported their findings recently in the U.K. journal Behavioural Ecology - have also shown that other wasp spiders also employ the same mechanism. “We presume that genital mutilation only makes sense if there is hardly any chance of further copulation anyway,” said Uhl - the males sacrifice everything in their one chance of passing on their genes.

"This exciting discovery brings another twist to the evolution of sexual cannibalism," commented behavioural ecologist Marie Herberstein of Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia, who added that breaking off their pedipalps renders the males sterile.

Broken off pedipalps are not the only structures that male spiders use to interfere with females’ mating encounters. Many are known to use special secretions to create 'mating plugs', a kind of cork they use to block up the female's insemination ducts and prevent further inseminations from rival males.

Herbestein added that sexual cannibalism is common practice in spiders and that in some species, such as the Australia's red-back (Latrodectus hasselti), males actually sacrifice themselves to be eaten during copulation, as female redbacks are much less likely to mate again if they have cannibalised one mate.

Talk about extremes in sexuality and submission.
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Exploding Testicles

"Honey Bee: Exploding Testicles.

The reproductive cycle of bees is fascinating – and complex. But here’s the short story: a queen is selectively bred in a special "queen cell" in the hive and fed royal jelly by worker bees to induce her to become sexually mature.

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 eligible bachelors in the colony). But don’t call these drones lucky because during mating, their genitals explode and snap off inside the queen!

Strange as it is, this actually makes evolutionary sense: the snapped-off penis acts as a genital plug to prevent other drones from fertilizing the queen. But tell that to the dead drone whose penis just exploded.

[Note: this strategy is so successful that it is apparently employed by other species of animals, such as the male wasp spider]"

snagged from here: http://www.neatorama.com/2007/04/30/30-strangest-animal-mating-habits/

Sex & Violence at Sea

"It is the greatest animal battle on the planet, and it has finally been caught on camera.

A BBC natural history crew has filmed the "humpback whale heat run", where 15m long, 40 tonne male whales fight it out to mate with even larger females.

During the first complete sequence of this behaviour ever captured, the male humpbacks swim at high speed behind the female, violently jostling for access.

The collisions between the males can be violent enough to kill."

Entire story with video here.

The footage is beautiful and dynamic, and the "how we did it" footage is equally as compelling.

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