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Animals' Sex, Sexuality & Sexual Behavior

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Frisky dolphin seeks loving partner

Dolphin luring swimmers off for sex

LONDON (Reuters) - Swimmers have been warned to stay away from a sexually frustrated dolphin off a seaside resort after it tried to lure unwary humans out to sea in a bid to mate with them.

The Times newspaper said on Tuesday that the bottlenose dolphin, nicknamed Georges, had arrived off Weymouth, Dorset, about two months ago after following a trawler across the Channel.

"This dolphin does get very sexually aggressive. He has already attempted to mate with some divers," U.S. marine mammal expert Ric O'Barry told the paper.

;)

More here.
 
Watch out randy emu about

Posted on Thu, Oct. 16, 2003

Looking for love -- 300-pounds of emu love

Associated Press

DEFUNIAK SPRINGS, Fla. - He stands six feet tall, weighs 300 pounds and may be looking for love, says the owner of an ostrich-like emu that was on the loose in the Florida Panhandle.

The flightless bird that escaped from his pen Wednesday remained at large Thursday, said Walton County sheriff's Capt. Danny Glidewell.

Jeff Crawford, who has raised the emu for eight years, said the bird could be dangerous.

"I don't want to be held liable if that sex-crazed thing does something to somebody," Crawford said. "I want people to know he's running around out there."

Crawford said the emu was spooked and jumped the fence when a neighbor hauled a large trailer down their rural road.

"You've got a 50- or 60-foot trailer coming down this little road, breaking off tree branches and making all kinds of noise," Crawford said. "Heck, I'd run, too."

http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/weird_news/7029482.htm
 
Of course i speak of Melanophila acuminate. The Jewel Beetle:

Jewel beetle flies into the inferno
By Louise Dalziel

There is a beetle that, instead of fleeing like most other animals when confronted with fire, spreads its wings and flies in droves straight towards the inferno.

In fact, the jewel beetle, or black fire beetle as it's known in Canada, needs a blazing forest fire to breed.

Anecdotal reports suggest the beetles will travel many kilometres to reach a forest fire.

When they arrive, they are guaranteed sex and a safe place to lay their eggs with a great supply of food laid on for the next generation.

The beetles can join a mating frenzy, free from any threat of predation; everything that might fancy eating them having already fled from the blaze.

They lay their eggs in the burnt wood of dead trees. Once inside the charred tree trunks and branches, the eggs can hatch and munch on their surroundings safely cocooned inside the dead wood.

If alive, the trees would protest to beetle-nibbling by exuding toxic chemicals, drowning the beetle larvae in sticky resin or squashing them to death with prolific cell growth.

Mysterious pits

Back in 1960, a Canadian entomologist called William George Evans was sitting in a restaurant in Edmonton when a shiny black beetle landed beside his plate on the white tablecloth.

Having recently moved to Alberta, he was unfamiliar with this insect so, driven by scientific curiosity, he scooped the beetle up into the lid of his fountain pen and took it home to identify.

His reference books revealed that he had captured Melanophila acuminate.

His identification key also referred to tiny pits on the beetle's thorax or chest.

Sure enough, when Professor Evans looked closely, there they were. He studied the beetle for a number of years until he was confident that he knew what the function of the mysterious pits was.

He believed they must be sensory pits, densely packed with tiny receptors that enabled the beetle to sense infrared radiation; the heat given off by a blazing inferno.

The problem was nobody believed that a beetle was capable of doing this and Professor Evans' observations fell, for many years, on deaf ears.

Now, a team of German researchers, led by Dr Helmut Schmitz at the University of Bonn, has not only confirmed Professor Evans' findings but it has taken the understanding of how the beetle senses its environment to a higher level.

Flickering flames

Melanophila acuminata uses a combination of supersensitive cues to seek out a fire.

They see the red flickering flames, they hear the crackling of the burning wood and, as chemical ecologist Dr Stephan Schutz discovered, they use supersensitive receptors on their antennae to "smell" the products of a fire - even in minute quantities.

It has taken years of meticulous research by a team of biologists, physiologists, chemical ecologists and finally a physicist to start to unravel the beetle's infrared detecting secrets.

Since working on M. acuminate, the German team has discovered that two other species of fire beetle, this time in Australia, also use infrared detectors to guide them to fire.

The exciting thing about this is that the infrared detectors these beetles use are different from the ones of their Northern Hemisphere cousins.

Now, the scientists are putting their knowledge of how the beetles sense infrared radiation to use.

With the help of engineers they plan to develop the next generation of infrared detectors. They already have a working prototype and are busy trying to increase its sensitivity and make it smaller.

It does not come as any surprise that the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) in the US can see the massive military potential for a new generation of supersensitive, miniature, robust, uncooled, infrared detectors inspired by a humble heat-seeking beetle.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4362589.stm
 
This is strange - monkeys and deer having sex.

Sex between snow monkeys and sika deer may be 'new behavioural tradition'


Sexual interactions between snow monkeys and sika deer could be a new behavioural tradition within a group of monkeys observed in Japan, researchers have suggested.

While the first report of a male Japanese macaque, or snow monkey, and female sika deer taking to each other was revealed earlier this year, scientists say they are now confident the behaviour is sexual after scrutinising adolescent females suggestively interacting with stags at Minoo in Japan.

“The monkey-deer sexual interactions reported in our paper may reflect the early stage development of a new behavioural tradition at Minoo,” said Dr Noëlle Gunst-Leca, co-author of the study from the University of Lethbridge in Canada.

While sexual interactions between closely related species have been seen for all manner of animals, from various species of fish to species of baboon, such liaisons are rare, with the sexual assault of king penguins by Antarctic fur seals the only other known example between distant species.
 
Contrary to what the site implied; the monkys were only interested in other monkeys. They did not mate with foreign animals.
 
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Contrary to what the site implied; the monkys were only interested in other monkeys. They did not mate with foreign animals.

You must have missed this bit:

"There’s also the macaque, which has been spotted having sex with deer numerous times."
 
There was an extraordinary paper written a while back on macaque/deer sexual habits, and whether they represented some kind of inter-species social function. Never got my head around it.

Up until a couple of years ago, I worked in a zoo, and the alpha male Orangutan - not a monkey, I know - had (before my time) once apparently had his way with a pigeon, which can't have been a pretty sight.
 
New imaging techniques finally allow biologists to study and analyze how millipedes "do it."
Scientists finally figure out how millipedes actually do it

Scientists have a pretty good handle on how the birds and the bees work, but it comes to mating, almost all millipedes have been a mystery -- until now. For the first time, researchers have puzzled out how these tiny creatures' complex genitalia work, thanks to new imaging techniques and blacklights that make the different tissues glow. The findings are published in a new paper in the journal Arthropod Structure and Development.

"This is the first time we've been able to understand these millipedes' mechanism of insertion, how the male and female organs interact with each other. Before this, we had no idea how he would actually get the sperm into her," says Petra Sierwald, an associate curator at the Field Museum in Chicago and one of the paper's authors. ...
FULL STORY:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200213160105.htm
 
A further extract from that citation:

As mountain ranges and rivers formed, groups of millipedes would get cut off from each other and develop into new species." And, she notes, Pseuopolydesmus is just the tip of the iceberg.

"There are 16 orders of millipedes in the world, and for most of them, we have only faint ideas what the vulvae look like."
Which puts all sorts of life into perspective, whilst reminding me of this....

'Legs' by ZZ Top said:
She's got legs, she knows how to use them
She never begs, she knows how to choose them
She's holdin' leg wonderin' how to feel them
Would you get behind them if you could only find them?
She's my baby, she's my baby
Yeah, it's alright
 
Smithsonian magazine posted this article describing 14 odd animal ways of mating - from giraffes "taking the piss" to the male Australian antechinus literally fornicating itself to death and beyond ...
Fourteen Fun Facts About Love and Sex in the Animal Kingdom

Dating apps have reduced the ritual of human coupling down to a swipe. Out in the wild, though, love and sex don’t come as easy. Creatures of all sorts have evolved some pretty spectacular strategies to woo their mates and ensure their genes carry on. Here are just a few examples of extreme courtship and copulation that put us tech-savvy humans to shame. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/14-fun-facts-about-love-and-sex-animal-kingdom-180974205/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+smithsonianmag/science-nature+(Science+&+Nature+|+Smithsonian.com)
 
Fugly male bats gather and 'sing' through their built-in furry masks to woo the females ....
WrinkleFaceBat.jpg
World's ugliest bats sing through 'face masks' made of skin to woo the ladies

If you had a face as puckered as a wrinkle-faced bat's, you too might hide behind a mask to seduce a mate.

When breeding time rolls around for male wrinkle-faced bats (Centurio senex), they gather together in groups and cover the lower half of their remarkably wrinkly faces with white-furred flaps of skin that resemble face masks. They then chirp ultrasonic songs through the masks while twiddling their wings.

Scientists long suspected that the skin flap under the chins of these elusive bats had something to do with courtship, and researchers recently observed and documented this astonishing sight for the first time. Dozens of male bats masked up (only the males have masks) but didn't socially distance. Instead, these "masked seducers" perched together and sang in a group courtship display unlike any seen before in bats, researchers wrote in a new study. ...

... It's possible that a raised face mask may send a visual signal to females that a male is ready to mate, or perhaps it traps olfactory secretions that are released when the mask is lowered at the moment of copulation, according to the study. ...

every night, the bats assembled in the same spot between 6 p.m. and midnight local time, hanging about 10 feet (3 meters) above the ground. The team recorded video with an infrared-sensitive camera, and captured audio of the bats' ultrasonic songs and echolocation calls.

As many as 30 male bats perched during the same night. Most of the time, they were masked, using their "thumbs" to pull the masks up or down. Through their masks, they sang "courtship songs" composed of echolocation sequences, trills and whistles, punctuated by sequences of wing beats, the scientists reported.

When a male successfully attracted a female companion, he "immediately lowered his mask" to mate with her. After they finished, about 30 seconds later, "the male immediately raised the mask again" and resumed singing and beating his wings with the rest of the male bats, the researchers reported. Female bats seemed to be highly selective when choosing their mates — 79% of the successful copulations were performed by just 6% of the males. ...

When males gather and perform together in competitive courtship displays such as these, the behavior is known as lekking. Lek mating parties are more commonly seen in birds, where they're found in at least 148 species. Lekking is poorly documented in mammals and is almost never seen in bats, according to the study. The researchers' observations raise intriguing new questions — about why they wear masks; how the males' health is affected by the rigors of group performance; how the males coordinate their songs and displays; and how female bats choose between the masked males ...


FULL STORY:
https://www.livescience.com/ugly-bats-face-masks.html

PUBLISHED REPORT:
The masked seducers: Lek courtship behavior in the wrinkle-faced bat Centurio senex (Phyllostomidae)
Bernal Rodríguez-Herrera , Ricardo Sánchez-Calderón, Victor Madrigal-Elizondo, Paulina Rodríguez, Jairo Villalobos, Esteban Hernández, Daniel Zamora-Mejías, Gloria Gessinger, Marco Tschapka
PLOS ONE
Published: November 11, 2020
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0241063
 
New imaging techniques finally allow biologists to study and analyze how millipedes "do it."

FULL STORY:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200213160105.htm
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