The 15 Most Bizarre Animal Mating Rituals

15 Bonobos

The Bonobo Monkeys are very possibly the culmination of anyone who believes in reincarnation's hopes and dreams. Sex for a Bonobo is not unlike a smile for a human. Or a handshake, a wink or clearing your throat. Sex is used as a greeting, as a method of conflict resolution and to celebrate when food has been found.

They are the only species that's been observed having sex face to face besides humans, as well as enjoying a little bit of French kissing and oral sex. They also engage in the occasional same-sex wank job and lesbian adventure--even incest. If sex can't fix it, these monkeys don't want to hear about it.

14 Banana Slugs

These slugs have a few issues in life, not the least of which is that they look like the end result of stomach cramps brought on by a diet high in lentils and curry.

Another problem for the lowly slug is that the average eight-inch slug has an eight-inch penis, and when he first realizes this, he's probably pretty stoked. Then when he hears through the grapevine that his mate could potentially chew it off, the wind may be taken from his sails.

Because their penis could be the same size as their body, they need to find a mate who's the same size. If they happen to have an issue with depth perception, they won't properly fit and their special friend will gnaw on it like a NASCAR fan with a stick of jerky to solve the problem. The record holder for banana slugs had a penis five times the length of its own body, which we assume he just wrapped around his head to pretend it was a cool pompadour and sideburns when not in use.

13 Brown Antechinus

The male of the species known as Antechinus Stuartii is so into sex, he will fuck until he rolls over and dies. A master man whore, during mating season, this little Australian marsupial pretty much drops everything in his life to have sex with as many females as possible. There's no time to eat or apply some kind of soothing cream to any rubbed-raw body parts as he will spend up to 12 hours at a time banging one female.

So at least he's leaving them satisfied--maybe not conscious, but satisfied.

And when he's done, it's on to another female. By the time mating season has ended, the constant stress of being a rodent-sized Wilt Chamberlain leaves the little bugger with a suppressed immune system, severe ulcers and at the mercy of parasites. He, and every other male who goes through the mating season, will then die.

12 Snails

Look, snails are just straight-up fucked up in every way. They look weird, they move at the speed of a highly-medicated old person and they leave spooge trails wherever they go (also like some highly medicated old people). However, when it comes to mating, the weirdness really stands out.

Snails are hermaphrodites and as such, have both male and female reproductive bits. Nonetheless, they still need a buddy to mate because snails, like Jesus, frown on self-love. When two of these hermaphroditic fiends get together to bump uglies, they engage in what scientists refer to as snail donkey punching.

One snail will shoot the other in the head with a "love dart," which isn't just some lame euphemism we made up, it's an actual lame euphemism commonly used to describe the weird calcified spike that Snail A uses to stab Snail B with in order to convince it to trade "small packets of sperm." Because they are both male and female, they fertilize each other then go about their merry way.

11 Hippos

Like dinner at the Olive Garden, Hippos are disgusting. When the male hippo is pretty sure one of the ladies in his neck of the woods is ready to get down to business, he seduces her in a way that even the majority of Cracked staff have never engaged in, at least not more than once.

Like a sly poon hunter out at the bars, the hippo positions himself where his potential mate can see him. Then he shits himself. To be fair, he also pisses at the same time. Obviously that alone is hardly going to impress the discerning lady hippo (any jackass can shit himself), so to prove he's got the goods, the male will spin his tail like a shit-flinging propeller at the same time, spraying about stink and filth which will be, apparently, irresistible to some of the local women folk.

10 Flatworms

Like snails, flatworms are hermaphrodites. And as luck would have it, they too seem to have been reading up on perverse practices on the internet before they got around to mating.

Since deciding who gets to be the man when you're both hermaphrodites is hard, the worms settle things the way all horrible fights at the bike rack after school were settled--a sword fight. And by that we mean penis fencing. And no, we didn't make that up, scientists really call it that, probably without snickering.

The two worms whip out wood and battle each other until one poor bastard gets jammed where the sun don't shine and officially becomes the woman. So it's sort of like prison in a way.

9 Earwigs

You aren't half the man this earwig is. And by that, we mean earwigs have two dicks.

Though some species only have one and are mocked horribly at earwig urinals, the ones with two tend to have a preference in use, meaning they're either right weinered or left weinered.

Because the earwig's wang is delicate like fine china, if it snaps off they just switch over to the other one and go about their business. So far, scientists are unable to tell if a right weinered earwig that has to use his left shoots off with all the girly-throwing power you'd expect.

8 Red-Sided Garter Snake

These things are dirty whores. Whereas regular, old fashioned, lights-off sex is good enough for most animals, the garter snake prefers to have sex in big, creepy orgies. When it comes time for the snakes to hibernate, they'll converge in groups that can number up to 30,000, which is probably the scariest goddamn thing ever.

As the world around them warms up, the mass of snakes leave their den and get to thinking of doing the deed. When a female joins the crowd, up to 100 males will jump her then and form a mating ball, which is exactly what it sounds like.

The snakes coil around one another in an attempt to be the one lucky dude who gets to taste forbidden snake fruit, while the rest dry hump the hell out of each other until they can never look each other in the eye again.

Note that some males will actually take advantage of this situation by releasing female pheromones. We'll leave it at that.

7 Whiptail Lizards

Native to Arizona, these lizards have apparently been infected with some manner of Sapphic Lilith Fair gene and somehow managed to entirely eliminate the male of the species.

As a result, the lizards are what scientists call "parthenogenetic unisexual pseudocopulators" but what we call "lesbo lizards." Since there are no males, the females reproduce on their own, making exact copies of themselves.

However, proving that porn has many life lessons to teach us, the lizards still need another woman to get the job done. A butchy female, noted by her small undeveloped eggs, will hop on another female who has rich, robust, ready-to-be-lesbianized eggs, and mock hump her lizard brains out while some awesome jazz plays in the background.

6 Hyenas

The hyena is like that "woman" at the bar with an Adam's Apple, who asks you to call her Steve and does things to you in the bathroom that you'll never speak of to anyone ever again.

An alpha female in the hyena world passes on a super dose of hormones to its young that makes them extra aggressive, which increases their chances of survival. The downside is that all these extra hormones make mom awfully manish and since hyenas can't have man hands, they get the next best thing: a giant clitoris. A giant, 7-inch clitoris that just sticks out making people on safari feel shamed and emasculated.

Weird as that is, the further downside for the hyena here is that the birth canal is inside that giant clitoris, so in effect, the female has to give birth through a penis. This also means the male has to make sweet, awkward, hit-and-miss love to one, which can apparently take months of practice until he can line everything up right. Once the magical moment happens, she pushes him off and puts a cigarette out on his thigh.

5 White-Fronted Parrots

This is another one of those very few species besides humans that engage in kissing, isn't that just so friggin' precious? When they initiate mating, they snuggle up together and lock lips, which isn't easy when you have those bird lips known as "beaks." However, once the male is pretty sure the lady bird is digging his tongue dancing, he takes things to the next level the way only a true man can. With vomit.

Like so many off-putting video clips from Japan that find their way into our inbox, the birds mix sex and puking in a way nearly half our editorial staff are uncomfortable with.

4 Bed Bugs

Feel free to not read further as this is the kind of stuff generally found in direct-to-DVD horror films, usually with a title like Drill Rape.

Yes, unlike some animals with their adorable-like-a-Disney-cartoon courting rituals that actually take the time to find the female's genitalia, bed bugs at some point just said "fuck it" and developed the most horrifyingly-named mating practice called "traumatic insemination."

To overcome the female's resistance against getting boned, the bed bug basically just stabs a random hole in her abdomen with his penis and then inseminates her. It is unclear whether "traumatic" refers to the mating ritual itself or just the fact a bed bug is packing a Johnson as sharp as a Ginsu knife.

3 Anglerfish

The male anglerfish is born as and lives his life as one giant, useless freeloader. This is the boyfriend who'll move in and live on your sofa while he holds out for a job that doesn't require him to do anything.

As soon as the male anglerfish is old enough, its entire digestive system shuts down. Since it can no longer eat or live on its own, it needs to find a woman to mooch off of.

Once it does so, he bites her and releases an enzyme that bonds their flesh together permanently, thus making the male a parasite that lives off the female, releasing sperm whenever she's ready to lay eggs. So, while those teeth make them look badass, the anglerfish is nature's ultimate symbol of clingy wussification.

2 Porcupines

As you can probably guess, the male porcupine isn't getting any unless the female is good and ready. Not unless he wants hundreds of needles in his dick.

So how does the male get her ready? Well porcupines are apparently very European when it comes to mating, which is to say they piss on each other (no offense to Europeans, we've just seen some movies produced in Eastern Europe and noticed some common themes).

This tiny four-legged animal manages a six-foot-long stream of piss that soaks his potential mate from head to toe. So, accounting for scale, this would be equivalent of a human pissing for over 100 feet, which we think would, in fact, impress some females.

1 Cichlid Fish

These have to be the frat boy heroes of the animal kingdom, with a mating ritual seemingly designed purely to get high fives from its bros.

After laying her eggs, the female cichlid picks them up and carries them around in her mouth. Some males thus have spots on their lower body that resemble the eggs. They swim by the females, who see the fake eggs and, thinking they have dropped some, try to suck them in.

The male then blows his load in her face and open mouth, presumably while his friends film the whole thing and post it on the internet.

If you're tired of hating animals for getting laid more than you, why not read about some that are genuinely terrifying in our rundown of The 5 Most Horrifying Bugs in the World, and then read about some that are only terrifying once it's too late in The 6 Cutest Animals That Can Still Destroy You.