Isn’t This Something You’d Want to Know About Animals?
If you generally enjoy tuning in to TMZ to catch up on the latest celebrity se* scandals, then you can only imagine all the things you’re missing by not choosing Discovery or National Geographic instead. The details of animal mating are titillating, to say the least, quite amusing, and plain weird, all at once.
In fact, we’re absolutely convinced that you would like to know a couple of unusual facts about them, especially when it comes to how they spend their sexy time. So today, we will explain a series of odd animal se* facts, rating from non-stop erections of alligators all the way to arrow-shaped “love darts” wielded by snails and slugs. Are you ready? Neither are we but let’s go!
Male alligators have non-stop erections
Peni*es might differ across the animal kingdom, obviously, but there’s still a universal theme revolving around it: that this organ changes its size or shape before or during the act of mating, then comes back to its “usual” form. That doesn’t really apply to alligators, though.
The males are endowed with constant erect peni*es, layered with many coats of the stiff protein collagen, which lurk inside their cloacas (chambers that have digestive and reproductive organs, then burst out all of a sudden like the baby alien from John Hurt’s stomach in “Alien.”
The six-inch-long pen*s of an alligator aren’t even everted, or turned outward, by muscles but more by the application of pressure on its abdominal cavity, which is quite an essential bit of reptilian foreplay.
Female kangaroos have three vaginas
Female kangaroos (all marsupials, for what it’s worth) have three vag*inal tubes but only one opening, so to speak. This way, there’s no confusion on their mates’ behalf. When males inseminate females, their liquid travels up either (or both) of the side tubes, and around 30 days later the tiny joey travels down the central tube, from which it slowly makes its way to its mother’s pouch for the rest of the gestation.
Antechinus males copulate themselves to death
The antechinus, a small, mouselike marsupial living in Australia, would probably go completely unnoticed except for one super odd fact: during their brief mating season, the males copulate with females for up to 12 hours straight, completely stripping their bodies of vital proteins in this process, and fully dismantling their immune systems.
Very soon after that, the exhausted males drop dead, and the females go on to bear the litters with mixed paternity (the babies have different fathers). The moms also live a bit longer to nurture their offspring, but they generally die within the year, having had the opportunity to breed only once.
Flatworms fence with their se* organs
Flatworms are some of the simplest invertebrate animals on the planet. They lack well-defined circulatory and respiratory organs. They also eat and poop via the same body opening, which is quite concerning.
However, all the bets are off during the mating season, as the hermaphroditic critters, which have both male and female organs, sprout pairs of dagger-like appendages and fence in slow motion movements until a “hit” is scored, straight into each other’s skin.
Then, the “loser” is impregnated with sper* and becomes the mother, and the “father” goes on dueling until it becomes a mother itself, further complicating the confused gender roles.
Male porcupines urinate on females before se*
Once a year, male porcupines cluster around all the available females, fighting, biting, and scratching one another for the right to mate. Then, the winner climbs onto a tree branch and urinates straight on the female, which basically stimulates her to go into estrus.
The rest is a bit anticlimactic, to be honest: the female folds back her quills to avoid impaling her partner, and more routine insemination takes only a couple of seconds.
Barnacles have enormous penises
You can only imagine that an animal that spends its whole life stuck to one spot doesn’t have the craziest se* life. As a matter of fact, barnacles (and we can’t call them “males”, because these animals are, in fact, hermaphroditic), are gifted with the largest peni*es, relative to their size, of any other creature on earth.
How big? Let’s just say it’s eight times longer than their bodies. That’s right. In other words, frisky barnacles unfurl their organs and then attempt to fertilize every other barnacle in their vicinity, at the same time (why not?). We can only assume they probed and prodded themselves.
Mating snails stab each other with “love darts”
There are some hermaphoriditic species of snails and slugs that wield the invertebrate equivalent of Cupid’s arrow – they’re sharp, narrow projectiles made entirely of calcium and hard proteins, as a preliminary to the act of mating.
For example, one of these “love darts” pokes right into the receiving snail’s skin, getting through its internal organs, and also introduces a chemical that causes it to be more receptive to the attacking snail’s spe*m. These darts don’t put sp*rm into the female’s body, that happens another time, in the old-fashioned way, during copulation.
Female chickens can eject unwanted sp*rm
Female chickens (hens) are much smaller than roosters, and they often can’t resist when less-than-desirable males insist on mating. However, right after the act, some of them that are either enraged or disappointed can eject up to 80% of the offending male’s sp*rm, making room for another rooster who is a bit higher up in the pecking order.
Male honeybees lose their pen*ses while mating
While everyone talks about colony collapse disorder, which is affecting bee populations all over the world, few people acknowledge the peculiar plight of the individual drone honeybee. Right before a queen bee assumes her exalted title, she starts her life as a virgin bee and she has to be inseminated by a male to step up to the throne.
That’s also where the unfortunate drone comes in; meaning in the course of mating with the heir, the male’s pen*s comes off, while still inserted into the female. Then, he peacefully flies off to die. Given the entire gruesome fate of male honeybees, it’s truly no surprise that full-grown queens are deliberately breeding them in their so-called “mating yards.”
Sheep have a high rate of homose*uality
As it turns out, homose*uality is an inherited biological trait in certain members of the animal kingdom, and as it turns out, it’s quite rife among male sheep. Some say that almost 10% of rams prefer to mate with other rams rather than females. As it turns out, this behavior is reflected in a specific area in their brains, the hypothalamus, and it’s quite hard-wired rather than just a learned behavior.
Male anglerfish merge with females during mating
Anglerfishes lure their prey with fleshy structures growing from their heads, and they live quite deep into the ocean. They’re also very scarce because there aren’t many available females. Luckily, nature always finds a way, so much so that males of some anglerfish species are orders of magnitude smaller than the other s*x, so they simply attach themselves to their mates, feeding them with constant, well, supply.
It’s even thought that this evolutionary trade-off is the reason why women grow to normal sizes and prosper in the food chain.
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