Monogamous Animals and Random Useless Facts

This is what staying home on a Saturday night does to a crazy girl with weird ideas and lots of time on her hands. And my apologies for all the website addresses and book names and quotes...plagiarism is the worse crime any writer can commit and if my high school cousins (i miss you) are reading this... they really do give Fs in college for plagiarism.

So I was having the most random but interesting conversation about swans two nights ago. Mr Cup-of-Tea Paul met "the" Swan expert and found out cool facts (well I'm a dork so I thought they were cool). Swans don't peck you when they attack, they beat their wings (about 8 feet wide) with a force that could easily break your arm. They don't instinctively know their migration path, thus if a swan gets separated with it's parents before he learns where to go, he's screwed. And you all know ugly duckling right? Swans only turn white after 2 years. Swans are monogamous too, this pair above courted for a year and will be mating for life. The swan is the icon of fidelity. Aww... but while surfing the internet on more monogamous animals (Only about 3% of the 4,000 mammal species are monogamous (and Homo sapiens isn't one of them! You can google up the list but here are my favorites : puffins, penguins, bald eagles, artic foxes, orcas, black vultures, prairie voles-they have a gene that makes them monogamous-)... I came upon this:

"Everyone has heard of how birds such as swans supposedly pair monogamously for life," said Adrian Forsyth, a senior biodiversity scientist at the Smithsonian Institution and author of "A Natural History of Sex."

"But in fact, monogamously paired female waterfowl are often subjected to copulation attempts by males other than their mates," events that sometimes injure or kill the female. "Such forced copulations may be perpetrated by unpaired males that have been unable to attract a mate and have little to lose and something to gain by forcing themselves on a female."

The only apparent controls upon this behavior by male waterfowl is female resistance and a mate coming to her defense. Mated males, however, are sometimes elsewhere: Studies show that mated waterfowl engage in forced copulations as well, Forsyth said. (http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/science/20020904-9999_mz1c4monogam.html)

It's a sick sad world out there... which got me thinking about this book that one of my favorite movies was based on. It tries to explain men's behavior based on research on the males of the animal kingdom, then I got carried away google-ing so here are the SOME RANDOM USELESS FACTS.

(you know those things that get stuck in your head that never show up in tests...the ones you're itching to write down at the back of your test paper under the made-up heading -BONUS- to show the teacher that you do in fact know some things, they're just not very relevant hahaha)

But now that most of us are working already... I have thought of 5 uses for these facts (feel free to post more ways to utilize the facts):

1) to gross out Ate A (or any older sister, or lala)

2) to turn off and shut up any guy trying to chat you up in a bar so he'll leave you alone(though this might backfire if he knows some of your new found friends- they're going to think you're a deranged disturbed weird girl)

3) to sound smart when you're with kids (the grosser the fact, the more cool points you get. Although you should reword the facts to suit their age)

4) to concentrate and try to remember the facts and spell the words in your head to see whether you should stop drinking or not (giggling non-stop, stuttering, demonstrating the facts, announcing it to the whole world, saying it to the same person over and over again, saying boneyhee instead of honeybee and wanting to toast to every random fact you remember or crying over the poor swallowed babies are signs that you have had enough to drink)

5) to write a novel about new cows and old cows and to explain why men act the way they do (which is where I got some of the facts from... someone really did research on it to make her novel -- animal husbandry by laura zigman-- which the movie someone like you was based on but a lot of parts were changed)

The Lovers Hall of Fame (http://news.nationalgeographic.com - Adapted from Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation )

Most explosive lover: Male honeybee
When the male honeybee ejaculates, he explodes and his genitals tear from his body with an audible snap. His body falls to the ground, but his genitals remain inside the female, preventing her from mating again—an extreme form of the chastity belt.

Most monogamous: Black vulture
Monogamy—in which both partners are faithful to each other until one of them dies—is so rare that it qualifies as one of the most deviant behaviors in biology. The reason is simple: For monogamy to evolve, couples who are monogamous must have more children, on average, than couples who are not. This is rarely the case. But one species that does appear to be monogamous (although the data are still quite scant) is the black vulture. Bizarrely, black vultures seem to have a social convention that prevents philandering. Any vulture that attempts to have sex in a public place (at a roost, or alongside a carcass) will be roundly attacked by other vultures in the vicinity.

Most wanton female: Chimpanzee
Female chimpanzees are astonishingly promiscuous. Some are on record as having copulated with eight different males in 15 minutes. Others have racked up 84 trysts in eight days with seven different partners.

Female least likely to suffer from penis envy:
Most seahorses and spotted hyena
Penises have evolved in countless variations. In sharks, the penises (male sharks have two) are rolled-up pelvic fins. In spiders, the penises (again, males have two) are modified parts of the mouth. Among seahorses, however, the female does not receive sperm, but the male receives eggs. The female has evolved a phallic structure with which to deliver her eggs so that a male seahorse becomes pregnant. The female spotted hyena has a pseudo-phallus—a grossly enlarged, fully erectile clitoris—but why this is so is a mystery. The male and female genitalia look so much alike that for many years the spotted hyena was thought to be a hermaphrodite.

Most demanding lover: Lioness
A lioness in heat desires sex at least once every half an hour for four or five days and nights. The reason for her enormous sexual appetite is unknown.

Worst dad: Japanese cardinal fish
Contenders for the title of Worst Dad (or Worst Mom) are legion: Most organisms don't look after their young at all. However, the Japanese cardinal fish deserves special mention. All child care is done by the male, who broods the young in his mouth until they are old enough to look after themselves. But if he encounters a female more attractive than the mother of his children, he hastily eats his kids and rushes over to court the new female.

Most diminutive lover: Green spoon worm
In most species (mammals being exceptions), females are larger than males. But the green spoon worm has taken this to an extreme. The male is 200,000 times smaller than the female—it's as though a human male were no bigger than the eraser on the end of a pencil. He spends his whole life sitting in a special chamber within his comparatively enormous mate, fertilizing her eggs.

Most gigantic sperm: Fruit Fly
This fruit fly is only three millimeters (about one-eighth of an inch) long from the top of its head to the end of its abdomen, yet it produces sperm that are 2.3 inches (58 millimeters) long. If a human male made sperm on a similar scale, they would be as long as a blue whale.

Least discriminative lover: Atlantic bottlenose dolphin
Dolphins have been recorded trying to copulate with seals, sharks, turtles, eels, and even humans. Small wonder that they engage in homosexual activity of various kinds and also masturbate.

Most chaste: Bdelloid rotifer
Bdelloid rotifers are small animals that live in patches of damp moss. In evolutionary circles, these creatures are infamous, because they have been reproducing without sex (they lay eggs that don't need to be fertilized) for more than 85 million years.

From the book:

-praying mantis: female devours male's head during copulation

-banana slugs: actually hermaphrodites. while mating, males chew each other's penises off.

-80% of all men who die during the act of sex do so while being unfaithful (aha!)

- ( from Sex, Evolution, and Behavior- Daly and Wilson) throughout the animal kingdom, males generally woo females, rather than the reverse. The element of the male strategy has been labeled the Copulatory Imperative. As much concerned with quantity as with quality, males are often rather indiscriminative in courtship... Among invertibrates as diverse as butterflies and hermit crabs, males are apt to court an astonishing variety of OBJECTS, indeed almost anything that bears some resemblance to a female. The principle also holds up in our own (homo sapiens) species.

- the coolidge effect (new cow-old cow theory) is the fact that rams and bulls never go for the same sheep or cow twice. They are "unmistakably resistant to mating with the same female. Thus, farms only need one male for breeding purposes.

- allelomimetic behavior is the term for males copying other males of the same species hence, they do the same thing to females as if genetically programmed

- in TIME magazine on an article called "the Chemistry of Love" (please send me a copy if you have it) it states that because falling in love produces amphetamine-like chemicals, some people "move franctically from affair to affair just as soon as the first rush of infatuation fades" and become "attraction junkies"

From some websites:

- it depends on what you mean by "mate for life." These creatures do mate for life in the social sense of living together in pairs but they rarely stay strictly faithful. (http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/science/20020904-9999_mz1c4monogam.html)

- "Particularly if you look at dopamine, oxytocin, and vasopressin—it has been demonstrated that they play an important role in human society; for instance, in love, social attachment, and reward. So there are great similarities [between voles and humans]." http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Publications/ZooGoer/2004/3/monogamy.cfm

The following facts are from http://www.azadocents.org/upclose.pdf

-Elephants spend weeks courting. The female calls; the males compete for her.Bigger is better; the largest bulls get over 65% of all copulations, according to some observers.
-Rhinos find love in a toilet. The near-sighted male follows the female’s urine trail for several days, chasing her as she runs. He whistles and sprays urine; they bite and chase, toss and butt heads, and bellow. He stays inside for more than an hour.
- Hippos court in water. A male must be submissive and defer to the female. During copulation, buoyancy lifts the male over the female.
- Lions also indulge in lots of foreplay when the female is in heat.George Schaller observed one male lion having sex 86 times in 24 hours with two females, then 62 times in the next 24 hours, for a total of 157 times in 55 hours.
-Warthogs invented the term “screwing.” He has a corkscrew-shaped penis; she has grooves around her cervix.The actual mating usually takes less than a minute.
- Giraffes “neck.” The male tests the female for estrous by nudging her underside to get her to urinate.
- Orangutans are solitary and use this long call to attract mates. He shakes branches and topples dead trees, sending out a roar that can last several minutes and be heard nearly a mile away. Females seek out the largest male.
- Gorilla courtship is fun. He sniffs her armpits and genitals and may strut and beat his chest. She lies in front of him, makes suggestive pelvic movements, and may ride his back to intensify the excitement.
- Kangaroos have unusual sex organs. She has three vaginas. His penis is behind the scrotum, facing down and back.
- Bats can do it up-side down. His penis is like a gearshift. They mate in fall or winter, with sperm stored until eggs are produced in the spring. Sometimes they hibernate with their sex organs locked.
- How do porcupines mate? Very carefully! She is receptive only for eight to ten hours during a mating season, but she’s very cooperative during that brief span.
- Peacocks and other flashy birds prove their worth by their fantastic feathers. The battles among males using good looks to attract choosy mates have led to extreme flamboyance. Growing and maintaining such showy but costly feathers is a sign of a healthy male. Bright colors mean a good diet, proving that he can be a good provider with skills in foraging and finding food, and freedom from parasites.
- Eagles are monogamous. The male must impress the female by hunting and killing, and performing a “sky-dance” of diving and swooping. They “fall head over heels in love,” then soar through the air with talons clasped, tumbling in cartwheels up to 200 feet.
- Crowned cranes are also monogamous and have a flamboyant mating dance that gets shorter every year until they reach the “Oh heck—let’s just lay the eggs” stage. They have been likened to humans!
- Penguins (Humboldt) pair bond for life but will seek out a new mate if one dies. Their foreplay is ecstatic. Their heads go back and flippers flap, with loud singing.
- A male spider will wrap up an insect in silk, give it to the female as a present, and mate with her while she’s unwrapping the gift.
- A male squirrel must be submissive, acting like a baby to attract a female.

AND FINALLY A LITTLE SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED EARLIER TONIGHT:



Ate Anna(on puffins): Aww they're monotonous too?!

Well atleast she's not as bad as our friend's older sister who said "oooh look a quarter moon! Let's sit here and wait until it gets full!" HAHAHA (but she's normally really smart, don't we all have lapses?)