Imagine for a second that you’re a male black widow spider, Latrodectus hesperus. You spot a beautiful female and fall head-over-heels for her. She takes you back to her place where together, your bodies become one in the sweetest of sweet spider love. But just when you least expect it, as you roll over for the requisite post-coital snuggling, she eats your face and tears you limb from limb, leaving nothing but a bloody torso and a broken heart. What’s even worse is that six months later, she’s engaged to some guy who’s three inches taller than you and plays acoustic guitar in his spare time. If you think I’m speaking from anthropomorphic experience, you wouldn’t be wrong. I’m not bitter, I swear.
So how do you avoid becoming a bloody torso? Don’t fret, for science has the answer. Researchers from Arizona State University reported in the August issue of Animal Behaviour that many male black widows successfully avoid sexual cannibalism by identifying well fed females based on environmental cues in their webs. So if you find yourself in the web of a femme fatale, or a homme fatale for that matter — hello, George Clooney — and it looks as though he or she hasn’t eaten of late, take my advice and back away slowly.
The animal kingdom is ripe with mating tips, some useful and others not so much, that should come in handy as we enter the romantic mine field that is mid-February. Particularly at this time of year, we humans expend a great deal of energy trying to gauge level of attractiveness in the minds of prospective mates. Porcupines and giraffes have developed elegant solutions to all this ambiguity and uncertainty. Their secret is urine, and a lot of it.
Dr. Albert Shadle writes in the Journal of Mammalogy, that when a male porcupine, Erethizon d. dorsatum, wishes to mate with a female, he will rear up on his hind legs with his penis erect and urinate on her, soaking her from “nose to tail” from up to six feet away. Dr. Shadle remarks that “the quantity of urine used and the force with which it is discharged are surprising.” If it surprised Dr. Shadle, we can only imagine what the female porcupines must have been thinking.
Luckily for male giraffes, Giraffa camelopardalis, they aren’t expected to shower their mating partners with urine like the porcupine. Imagine how long they would have to spend at the watering hole to build up the reserve necessary to hose down an entire giraffe. Giraffe mating instead entails what Dr. Fred B. Bercovitch, called “flehman” or urine testing in a 2006 article in the journal Hormones and Behaviour. A male giraffe will nuzzle the hindquarters of a female to induce urination, at which point, he helps himself to a few mouthfuls in order to ensure that the female is in heat. There’s nothing like a 100 cc of pee to set the right mood.
One of the drawbacks of being a male in practically any species is the stiff competition that comes with finding a mate. This is especially true of honey bees, Apis mellifera. Of the thousands of potential male suitors in the hive, only a select few will get the opportunity to take a mating flight with the virgin queen bee. But even if a male drone bee is lucky enough to be one of the chosen few, his reproductive success is far from guaranteed. Male honey bees have developed what can only be described as a suicide bomber approach to address this problem. For a male bee, mating is literally a castrating experience because when he finishes with the queen, he leaves his penis and testicles lodged inside of her. It’s probably for the best because he wouldn’t want to stick around for what happens next: the abandoned testicles explode, and the remaining penis acts as a mating plug to prevent any would-be males from making an additional genetic offering.
Exploding testicles aside, I would imagine that women sometimes get pretty tired of having to put up with all the bravado driven male infighting that gets carried out in the name of attracting female attention. If you’re one of these women, perhaps you should suggest to your male suitors that they do as bonobos (Pan paniscus) do and penis fence. That’s right, I said fence — but a penis replaces the rapier. Two males will hang face to face from a branch while rubbing their erect penises together in what is technically referred to as genito-genital rubbing. But don’t get confused; this isn’t some kind of alpha male thing. Bonobos use sexual activity as a means of social communication and conflict resolution. So when bonobos penis fence, everybody is a winner.
