5 Sex Tricks From Nature That Don’t Sound Very Fun at All
Animals arguably have just one mission: to pass on their genes and then die. Mating is the highlight of their entire life, and everything else they do (eating, mostly) serves only to sustain them long enough so they can mate.
Consider the Indian stick insect. One single mating session of the Indian stick insect can last for 79 days. That would be impossibly long for a human, who’d die of dehydration just a couple days into the venture, and the stick insect probably considers it an even longer time than we would. That’s because a stick insect lives for only around one year, total.
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But not all animals’ sex lives present something to which we must aspire. Read about the following creatures’ mating habits, and you’ll find yourself just saying, “Oh. Ew.”
The Leopard Slug’s Penis Is Stuck to Its Face
In the below photo, that long white thing is a penis. No, it’s not some substance dripping from a penis — the white object is a penis, measuring more than two feet in length. The animal it belongs to, the leopard slug, is only around eight inches, which may be tremendously long for a slug but it’s still very small for anyone with a 30-inch penis.
A large penis might sound like a blessing. But the leopard’s slug penis normally stays inside its body, and when it extends out for sex, it emerges from the right side of its head, through an opening called the gonopore. When two slugs mate, they climb into a tree and then lower themselves from a branch, hanging by a thread of mucus. Next, they each unsheathe their penises, and the two penises twist around each other, so each can transfer sperm to the other. Each slug will go on to lay eggs.
Scientists are at a loss about the evolutionary advantage of this strange process, and are at a loss about the extraordinary length of the strange penis. A much shorter penis, projecting from somewhere other than the face, would do just as well. But sometimes, individual members of a species wind up in an evolutionary arms race. They end up with giant organs that don’t help each at all but still make them look more desirable than the competition.
The Seed Beetle Has a Torture Phallus
We can break down the pros and cons of encountering a long penis. When it comes to the penis of the seed beetle, however, we see nothing but misery for whoever must deal with it.
That is the spiked penis of Callosobruchus analis, an insect whose name means — and we’re just guessing for this next part because we don’t know Latin — “huge barbs in your butthole.” The spikes anchor the male inside the female during mating, and if you imagine that the female has evolved some sort of perfectly fitting receptacle, we have bad news. The spikes instead rip apart the female’s reproductive tract, to no one’s benefit. Scientists studying this phenomenon produce charts where one axis is “harmfulness of male genitalia.”
The anchoring is useful to the species from a mating perspective because the female spends most of the session kicking, which would dislodge the male but for the anchoring. The internal damage, however, isn’t useful and is an example of imperfect evolution. The hope is that every time a male evolves some damaging feature, the female will evolve a perfect defense (this is known as “sexually antagonistic coevolution”), but it doesn’t always work out like that.
Female Frogs Play Dead to Deter Mates
If evolution needs these animals to mate, you might wonder why one of them would reflexively push off the other. You might guess it’s because one of them doesn’t want to mate, but we have to be careful about ascribing wants to creatures who are so simple. We could instead describe this as another evolutionary arms race. The female wouldn’t benefit from flinging off every male, but because it tries to, only the most driven males succeed in mating.
Something similar might be going on with frogs. Female frogs will sometimes try to get out of mating by playing dead.
Scientists prefer the term tonic immobility to “feigning death” because we don’t seriously know if this is something the frog actively chooses to do. But we do know that females will respond to a male’s grasps by going totally motionless, which may turn off the male and therefore spare them from a mating session that will last several hours. But sometimes, the male won’t be turned off. The male will find that its partner appears to be dead, and he’ll discover he’s into that.
A Rhino May Chase Another to Death
A whole lot of animal courtship comes down to males pursuing fleeing females. In quite a few animals, these physical chases can’t be serious attempts to escape mating, because when they get tired, both will rest for a bit, and then they resume chasing when both are ready.
Rhinos go through that kind of mating ritual. But sometimes, it doesn’t end so well, such as in this Bangladeshi zoo, where a male during one such ritual engaged in “insane conduct,” resulting in his suffering a leg injury and dying. Or there was this Dutch zoo, where an approaching male startled a female, who fell into a waterhole and drowned. Or there was this park where one female proved unwilling, and two males responded by goring her to death.
If it sounds like this all happens only because humans messed with them, know that in the wild, one-third of male rhinos kill each other competing for mates. Again: Evolution isn’t about cooperating for the common good. It’s about propagating the species, even if that means a situation that’s bad for everyone.
Male Mites Impregnate Females While Both Are in the Womb
The mite known as Adactylidium might well have the weirdest life cycle of any animal, period. Adactylidium don’t mate anytime between birth and death. Instead, male and female Adactylidium mate before they’re born.
The female mite is born already containing fertilized eggs. These eggs hatch inside her, but the offspring are still at this point within the womb. Then, still, in the womb, the offspring mate. Every brood consists of one single male and several females. These children (all siblings, of course) have sex while still unborn.
Then comes time for birth. The mother has no duct or orifice from which to expel her young. So, the offspring must eat their way out, a process that kills the mother. The young female mites will emerge, and the prenatal mating explains why they’re born with fertilized eggs.
Sometimes, the female and male offspring will both eat their way out, in which case the male will die within hours, never eating again. In other species, the male is never born at all. It dies in the womb, after mating. There is no need to live. Even without being born, it has fulfilled its purpose.
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