Six animals having worse sex than you

If you have passionate sex—or even, let’s be honest, mediocre sex—you are in the top 1 percent of all living beings. Sex is awful in the animal kingdom. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. It is, after all, a means to an end for most creatures. Sexual pleasure and passion aren’t priorities when a hermaphroditic snail impales its mate with a love dart. Their goals are to make babies and die.

The list of unappetizing mating rituals is extensive, but today we’re going to limit ourselves. Many of the customs are, after all, just not appealing to humans. Male camels inflate a large sac in their mouths so that it hangs out the side, cover themselves in stinky pheromones, and foam at the mouth in order to attract a mate. We’re not here to judge lady camels (or, for that matter, any male camels who find that sexy). We’re here to talk about sex that’s bad within a species.

What if sex were so bad, you’d fake your own death to avoid it? One PhD student at the University of Zurich, Rassim Khelifa, discovered that female dragonflies often pretended to die mid-air when an aggressive male was dogging her. Evidently, dragonfly sex is extremely painful (it’s TBD whether dragonflies are capable of emotional damage, but probably not). He was supposed to be studying climate change, but got distracted.

The best thing you can say about giraffe sex is that it’s short. Penetration lasts approximately one second, though it is preceded by a somewhat strange ritual. First, the male uses his head to whack a lady in the side, which prompts her to pee. He tastes the pee to see whether she’s secreting ovulation hormones. If she is, he proceeds to awkwardly follow her around, attempting to mount her from behind, as she walks away. And really, wouldn’t you?

Cowpea seed beetles have spiked penises, as if they were all medieval knights endowed with a mace where their reproductive organ should be. This seems to be, unsurprisingly, not at all enjoyable to the lady seed beetles, who struggle to get away as they are impaled. Today, they continue to evolve thicker vaginal linings in an attempt to not sustain physical damage during the act of procreation. Fun isn’t even close to a way to describe it.

ReadMore at:
https://www.popsci.com/animal-sex-is-bad#page-5

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Build An LED Lightsaber [Infographic]

Image
HOW TO BUILD A LIGHTSABER Step-by-step guide Herbert Pocket This infographic, created by Herbert Pocket, is a step-by-step guide for building a nerd's dream: grab some PVC, spray paint, LEDs, and a few other DIY trinkets, then make a lightsaber. There are a few tools in here not everyone is going to have access to (a soldering iron, for example), but if you've got them, it's a relatively simple 22 steps to your sword of the future. Make the handle out of PVC, put on some spray paint for flair, and add LEDs for the glow. If you're proficient with the tools, there's also enough wiggle room in the instructions to personalize, letting you toy with the handle width and, of course, the color. (If Samuel L. Jackson can get an exception made for a purple saber, so can you.) This would've been great for Halloween. But then again, maybe we want to wait until next year and plan a Darth Mickey costume around the Lucasfilm/Disney merge. Read More at: https://...
Read more

All the ways daylight saving time screws with you

Only a narrow band of people are really that affected by daylight saving. But gosh darn it, we will complain about it loudly every year. The annual switch to daylight saving time (DST) is the hour that launched a thousand angry articles. And honestly, this is one of the few events that actually warrants them. DST, in addition to not actually being invented by America’s favorite founding father Benjamin Franklin, is mostly a terrible idea. It has several origins, two of which can be traced back to doddering old white dudes whose leisurely lives meant they were collecting bugs and golfing in the evening. They didn’t understand why more people weren’t appreciating the out-of-doors, and so introduced the idea of shifting the daylight hours, basically in order to fit their own daily routines. DST eventually gained widespread appeal (if you can really call it that) in 1916, when it was a useful way to conserve wartime coal—having more daylight hours in the evening meant people used less ...
Read more