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So, my last post got pretty dark by the end; Headless mantises banging starving cannibals, ducks gang-raping and pecking their girls to death, bee penises exploding, slugs biting each other's head-penises off, committing suicide via non-stop sex and... so on. Feel free to read that before you go to bed.

I figure, if nature allows it, I'd look at some of the more light-hearted quirks of sexual reproduction in this second part.

Unfortunately, nature disagreed, so welcome to even more depraved acts of weird sex. Sorry.

Scary Genitalia

Genitalia in general looks weird. That could well be a subjective statement, but in some cases, like the duck penis, the freakishness is pretty much based in fact.

Take the common household cat for example, whose penis is covered in backwards-facing spines that scrape the walls inside the female in order to aid ovulation. Yeah, we ain’t even started yet.

Argonaut Octopus

This penis is truly alien, if you can call it a penis at all. When the male octopus – merely 10% the size of the female - finds a potential mate, he simply detaches a modified penis-arm from a pouch in his eye, which then actively swims towards her, sticks on with its suckers and fertilizes her. Then he dies.

Pseudobiceros hancockanus

What a name.

The cockanus is a type of flat worm and, like slugs, are hermaphrodites. But they are a little more aggressive in their approach to each other. It seems both members of the flat worm partnership want to be the male. I mean it’s easier to just dump your load and toss five bucks her way than actually waste time raising the kids, right?

So to get around this dispute, intercourse for the flat worms is actually more of a penis fencing match. Each worm has two shafts of penis to fight with, which often gouge holes in each other in hour-long sex battles. Naturally, the loser becomes the mother and has to feed and raise offspring. Fair’s fair.

Turtles

Ever wondered how turtles even have sex with all that shell in the way? Turtle penises come in all shapes and sizes to get around this issue, and that size typically ranges from ‘massive’ to ‘gigantic’. But it’s the shape that’s really interesting.

Depending on the species they can range from typically long shafts like humans, to flowering mushroom-like things and sharp, pointy knives. All turtles can control each individual part of the penis, like this Florida softshell penis, which has four separate channels to inseminate with.

If you want to see it in action with a squeaky toy, see below:

Bean beetles

I don’t even want to talk about this one. Just look at it:

Fruit Flies

(

These little insects have some big sperm. 2.3 inches long. Yes I did write inches. The sperm is 20 times longer than the fly itself. I mean, it works. Fertilization this way has an almost 100% success rate!

Ok enough penis talk, Holy cripes. Onto something lighter.

Necrophilia

Ok maybe not.

So depraved, so unnatural you must be thinking. Well… as it turns out, necrophilia is actually one of the more natural things mother earth has provided. It's not even uncommon.

30 species of birds have been identified delving into sex with dead birds. In one case, a gang of male Sand Martins were seen having sex with a dead male.

What’s more, 100 years ago, George Murray Levick, a scientist on an Antarctic expedition, found penguins doing things so awful that he wrote down his observations in Greek so only true intellects could read it. When discovered, the details were removed from his paper for 50 years due to the horrifying nature of it all.

So what did the penguins do? Well, not only were they caught having sex with dead females and males, but dead penguins from the year before. They would rape chicks or crush them in sexual frenzy, and kill females after sexually coercing them in gangs of half a dozen or so.

Not so cute now, are they?

The black and white tegu lizard, as well as frogs and other lizards have all been caught mating with dead, bloated females, too.

Functional Necrophilia

Yep. That’s a thing. In the case of an Amazonian frog, males are so plentiful that they mate with the girls in such huge numbers in the water that they tend to drown them in the process. So they might as well mount dead ones. In doing so, the male squeezes her in a way that releases the eggs from her body allowing him to fertilize them. Waste not, want not!

Inward… cannibalism?

We’ve already seen how popular cannibalism is, but in the case of the Strepsipterans, life is miserable from beginning to end. They exclusively live on the arse of wasps, and the male Strepsipterans, with only a few hours to do so, desperately stabs the female with its penis in another example of ‘traumatic insemination’. Not one to relent, God decides to add a final touch; the babies eat the mother from the inside out as part of their birth rite.

Spraying juices

Speaks for itself. Sometimes you just gotta play around with what juices you have.

The giraffe has to be picky when finding a mate. So, the male, when encountering a female, bumps her on the bum to induce urination. He then drinks the urine. If he likes it, he’ll follow her around until she’s too tired to resist, and have his way with her. Ah, the romance.

Similarly, the male porcupine urinates all over the female with a 6-foot stream until she’s totally drenched, in some fetishistic attempt to impress her.

The male Cichilid fish is less concerned about consent. Female Cichlid fish carry their eggs around in their mouths. A male then tricks her into thinking she dropped some by having egg-like spots on his body. When she approaches and tries to suck them in, the male ejaculates all over her face, fertilizing her eggs whether she likes it or not. You know, we don’t always have to mimic nature. Just sayin’.

Well. That was quite a ride, so to speak. I had to do some heavy editing, there were just too many examples of disgraceful behavior in nature, there could easily be a part 3, but I don’t want to ruin any more lives. Go take a cold shower. Everything will be just fine.

Oh, and by the way. Those cute little sea lions? Funny bouncy kangaroos? Also necrophiles.

Sources:

Octopus                           Fruit Fly
Flat worm                       Penguins
Bean Beetle                     Giraffe
Strepsiptera                    Sea lion

Previously:

Convergence
Stupid Design
Weird Evolution
The Axolotl
Mutual Symbiosis
Parasitic Symbiosis Part 1
Parasitic Symbiosis Part 2
Deception
Weird Sex Part 1