Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation

by Olivia Judson

  Dear Dr. Tatiana,

  It’s a fiasco. I’m a hopeless male three-spined stickleback. I was watching my eggs when I heard a sudden noise. I turned to look—just for a second—and when I turned back, all my eggs had been stolen. Who would do such a terrible thing, and how can I prevent its happening again?

  Want My Eggs Back in Vancouver

  Egg pirates—it’s an old problem. All you can do is remain vigilant. The trouble is, in many fish species females prefer to lay eggs in a nest that already contains some. They take the presence of other eggs as proof that the nest is safe, that the male who owns it is particularly manly or that he’s a good parent and unlikely to eat his babies. Success spawns success, you might say.

  And in sticklebacks, it often spawns a black market in eggs. I don’t mean that you get rough-looking fellows selling stolen eggs in the run-down parts of lakes and streams. No, the thief keeps the eggs for himself, taking them to his own nest so he can pretend he’s a breed of superdad. Why are sticklebacks particularly vulnerable to egg theft? We don’t know for sure. It may be that the eggs are easy to heist: unlike the eggs of most fish species, stickleback eggs stick to each other in convenient, portable clumps.

  Something like this goes on in the cloud forests of Papua New Guinea and the rain forests of Australia. The aristocrats of these forests are the bowerbirds, close relations of birds of paradise. And like their relations, bowerbirds mostly eat fruit. Because they are quite big, bowerbirds are easily able to monopolize fruit trees, scattering smaller birds out of their way. Thus, like aristocrats everywhere, most of these birds have lots of free time. And so, naturally, they have a hobby. It’s art.

  Male bowerbirds spend weeks building and decorating elaborate “bowers.” Depending on the species, the bower could be anything from a clearing strewn artfully with leaves to huts more than four meters (thirteen feet) wide or towers more than three meters (ten feet) high, woven out of sticks, painted with juice from crushed fruits, and decorated with flowers, mushrooms, feathers, snakeskins, snail shells, butterfly wings, beetle heads—or anything else that catches the artist’s eye. One scientist nearly had his camera stolen by a bowerbird who wanted to add it to his decor; another almost lost his socks. Artistic styles differ greatly among populations—even populations of the same species—so that whereas flowers might be fashionable in one area, beetle wings will be all the rage in the next. Moreover, this is no random collection of junk: the objects are selected and placed with great care. If you intrude into a bower and move things around, the artist will put them back again after you’ve gone. If you add objects that weren’t there before, he’ll take them away. And if you watch an artist at work, you’ll see him experimenting—trying out different items in different positions.

  Why do they do this? To impress girls, of course. Females come to the bowers to mate. And one way to make your bower look even better than a rival’s is to resort to theft and vandalism. Yes, I’m afraid that bowerbirds are not above foul play to further their own ends. Stealing is rife. Rare or fashionable objects vanish from one bower only to appear in another. And some bowers are regularly vandalized or completely destroyed. Vandals, like the egg pirates or any other common burglar, approach stealthily, tiptoeing through the undergrowth and freezing at the slightest sound.

  Worst of all, such behavior is often rewarded. In species like yours or theirs, females don’t seem to care how a male filled his nest with eggs or why he’s the only one with a collection of unusual feathers. They just go for the fellow with the most lavish display. In these species, as in so many others, I’m afraid that nice guys finish last.

  Boys, if you feel consumed with aggression, you’re probably experiencing a testosterone surge. Keep cool. Don’t plunge into battle with the first fellow you see—and above all, don’t let yourself be goaded into fighting over a woman. Remember: there are few circumstances in which you should actually throw down the gauntlet and fight. If you have doubts, refer to my Rules of Engagement.

  RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

  You should be prepared to fight to the death only if you can answer yes to both of the following questions:

  1. Is your only chance to mate here, now?

  2. Will fighting increase the number of girls you can mate with?

  If the conditions are not right for fighting to the death, it may still be appropriate to trade body blows. However, you should fight only if you think you can win. Since size is the primary determinant of victory, you should always pick on someone smaller than you. Before engaging in combat, try intimidation: flex your muscles, puff up your chest, shout, do whatever it takes to show your opponent there’s no point in fighting you. If, when you’ve done all this, you discover you’re less frightening than your opponent, retreat immediately. If you find you are always running away, do not despair. I have help for you in the next chapter.

  5

  HOW TO WIN EVEN IF YOU’RE A LOSER

  What if you’re poor? What if you’re ugly? What if you’re a wimp? What if you’re a poor, ugly wimp? Relax and read on …

  Dear Dr. Tatiana,

  I’m a sponge louse, and I recently won a battle for a sponge cavity that is home to a large harem of beautiful girls. But I’m starting to suspect that some of the girls are not what they seem: several look like men dressed as women. Am I being paranoid?

  Hoodwinked in the Gulf of California

  Lots of men share your worries. Indeed, Julius Caesar divorced his wife Pompeia, because he heard she’d been seduced by a young man, Publius Clodius, who had dressed up as a woman to gain entrance to the Feast of the Good Goddess, a women-only event. Caesar was right about the disguise but wrong about the seduction. Yet he had no mercy on Pompeia, declaring, “Caesar’s wife should be above suspicion.”

  Your fears are better-founded than his. Some male sponge lice look an awful lot like girl sponge lice. Take their size. Whereas you’re probably twice the size of a female, these males are the same size as the girls. Or take their uropods—rear appendages special to sponge lice, shrimp, lobsters, and other crustaceans. Whereas you have enormous uropods that make you look as if you’ve taken a pair of curved horns and attached them to your back end, these males have small, dainty uropods, just like the girls. Thus incognito, these female look-alikes often infiltrate harems. The larger the harem the higher the risk, so if yours is large, I’m afraid it probably does hold some males disguised as females. And if you look carefully, I bet you’ll find that’s not all. If there are any “little ones,” you’ll find they are really men, too.

  Why does this happen? Well, discretion is often the better part of valor, you know. In species like yours where females cluster together and thus one big male can easily defend a group, or in species where big males hold territories that females visit, small males cannot hope to compete directly. The big males would pulverize them. In such circumstances, therefore, it’s common for some fellows to adopt more subtle tactics—a sneak approach.

  There’s a lot of this around. Sneaking is especially popular among fish, with reports of it in more than 120 species. Consider the bluegill sunfish, a freshwater species from North America. Big males defend territories that females visit to spawn. The male then looks after the eggs and the fry. Small males resemble females—and behave like females, flirting with the big males just as females would. When a real female comes along, the bogus female joins in the courtship and releases his sperm when the big male does. Meanwhile, even tinier males whizz out from the shadows at the critical moment. And Caesar thought he had problems.

  But what determines whether a fellow will behave as a sneak? That depends. In some species, males adjust their behavior according to circumstance. Take the black-winged damselfly, Calopteryx maculata. Males defend territories along the banks of streams. But tired, old males can’t do this successfully—young, energetic fellows chase them off. The oldsters don’t despair, however. They’ll sneak onto another male’s territory, trying their luck with the girls while the terr
itory owner is busy fighting or fornicating. Likewise, worn-out horseshoe crabs don’t try to meet girls in the sea as younger males do. Instead, they rudely clamber on top of couples that are already spawning on the beach, adding their sperm to the mix.

  Alternatively, during his early development a male might “decide” to become a sneak. For example, a male exposed to a poor environment during crucial periods of growth may switch off the genes that encode huge weapons or cumbersome ornaments. After all, weapons are expensive. There’s no point in having them if you’re never going to win a fight anyway.

  This seems to be what happens in the bee Perdita portalis. The males either grow to be big and wingless, sporting huge mandibles, the better to fight with, or they remain small, grow wings, and don’t bother with the mandibles. Which form they take depends on how much food their mother supplied them with. Males whose mothers provided lots of food become big. Males whose mothers didn’t, don’t.

  Finally, sneaking might be genetically hard-wired—as it is in your case. The system is simple, based on one gene with three variants: alpha, beta, and gamma. Each sponge louse gets two copies of the gene, one from each parent. Alpha males arise when both copies received by a male offspring are the alpha variants of the gene. If a male has one copy of the beta variant, he will be a beta male—a female look-alike—regardless of what his other copy is. If a male has one gamma and one alpha variant or if he has two copies of the gamma variant, he will be a gamma male—one of the “little ones.”

  Female sponge lice don’t care whom they mate with. Their priority seems to be female companionship. Thus, when females leave the algal fields where they’ve been grazing and swim to shallower waters to mate and brood their eggs, they are attracted to sponges that already contain other females. Because females tend to congregate, alpha males typically have either no mates or several. Which is why alpha males—in contests that can last more than twenty-four hours—fight to take over colonies that are already established. The entrance to a sponge cavity is a chim-neylike structure. The resident alpha male lurks here, standing on his head so his huge uropods can stick out of the top. During a fight, the resident attempts to throw the intruder off the sponge; the intruder braces himself against the outside of the sponge and tries to haul the resident out of the chimney. Predictably, the intruder is more likely to be victorious if he’s bigger than his opponent.

  Beta males and gamma males are also drawn to sponges that already contain females. You shouldn’t blame yourself if some gamma males have managed to infiltrate the sponge. I’m sure you’ve made a gallant effort to keep them out; whenever you’ve caught one, you’ve no doubt tossed him off the sponge. The problem is, you are standing on your head, attempting to catch these fellows by feel, and they are most persistent. After enough tries, they usually manage to slip past you and down the chimney. But the presence of beta males is galling. These fellows don’t just look like females, they act like females, gaining access to the sponge by allowing you to court them. That’s right—just like a female sponge louse, they allow you to shake them vigorously.

  Why can’t you at least spot the beta males and keep them out? Well, beta males are the least common type, comprising only 4 percent of the male population. (Gamma males are next, at 15 percent.) So perhaps it’s not so bad admitting the occasional phony female. But, I hear you ask, won’t this lead to the population’s being taken over by transvestites? I doubt it. If one type of male had a clear and consistent advantage over the other two, it would rise in frequency in the population until the others vanished. Since we know all three types persist, each must do well in some situations but not in others.

  A striking example of how a male’s fortunes can depend on the other males around him comes from the side-blotched lizard, a small creature that lives on rocky outcrops on the coastal mountains of California. Here again, males come in three types: orange throats, blue throats, and yellow throats. Males with orange throats are big and belligerent and stake out large territories. Males with blue throats are smaller, less fractious, and hold smaller territories. Males with yellow throats resemble receptive females; these fellows neither fight nor hold territories. And as you’d expect, each type has a different style with the girls. Orange throats are wild philanderers. They copulate with all the females on their territory and often intrude into a neighbor’s territory to copulate with females there, too. Blue throats are not interested in lots of mates. Instead, they are possessive fellows and guard their partners jealously. Yellow throats, as you’ll have guessed, are sneaks. They have sex with females while other males aren’t looking.

  It turns out that each strategy is better than one other. The vigilance of blue throats means they are rarely cuckolded by yellow throats; however, blue throats cannot protect their females from the larger, more aggressive orange throats. Orange throats, meanwhile, are frequently cuckolded by yellow throats. The result? A perpetual oscillation. If orange throats do well one year, yellow throats do well the next, and blue throats the year after—and so on. For success, you’ve just got to be the right man at the right time.

  Dear Dr. Tatiana,

  I’m a peacock. But I have a lousy tail. It isn’t very big, and some of the eyespots are wonky. The whole effect is walleyed. When I put my tail up, the hens don’t even bother to feign indifference. They don’t look at me at all. Is there anything I can do to impress them?

  Invisible in Sri Lanka

  My advice: join a gang. If you can’t make it on your own, gangs are often the solution. What sort of gang? Well, they vary, depending on the circumstances. In species where a few males hold territories and the other males loiter on the fringes, a typical gang takes the form of a loosely organized charge, the loitering males rushing a territory together. For example, in the bluehead wrasse, a coral-reef fish that lives in the Caribbean, young males sometimes team up to chase a large male from his territory. When a female arrives, all the young males spawn with her.

  Similar invasions often happen in southern sea lion colonies. In this species, males are three times bigger than females and, as their name suggests, they also sport an impressive mane. The biggest males guard harems on the beach and chase the young males away. But young males are not without hope. From time to time, groups of as many as forty will rush the beach, breaking up harems and mating with females or even abducting them. To abduct a female, the male grabs her in his jaws, hurls her behind him, and then attempts to fend off her rescuers, often sitting on her to prevent her escaping.

  In your case, though, such yobbish tactics won’t work. Peahens don’t sit about in harems. They are much more independent. Thus, the best gang for you would be a lek—a group of males displaying together.

  Leks are common in species like yours, where females want nothing from males but their sperm. (Females can form leks as well, but they rarely do.) By definition, leks are not organized around food or nesting sites or anything else a male could usefully defend. Instead, a female visits a lek to compare and contrast, to see who’s the hottest of them all. Having selected, she mates and goes away again. For a girl this a great system. She gets to have sex with the guy she likes best—and doesn’t even have to see him in the morning.

  But it’s tough on boys. Being judged means you have to compete. That’s why lekking species produce some of the most astounding shows of talent, the most bodacious beauty contests on earth. In these pageants, males are being rated not on their personalities or their skill with children but on looks, voice, agility, or whatever it is that females find sexy. In Cyrtocara eucinostomus, a fish that grows to ten centimeters (four inches) in length, what females find sexy is sand castles. The males build conical sand castles, one mouthful of sand at a time, at a rate of one mouthful every fifteen seconds. It’s a massive task. The tallest sand castles—and females like the tallest ones best—take two weeks to build and are almost a meter wide at the base. That’s nearly ten times the male’s own length. In the hammerheaded bat, a large bat from West Africa, females
prefer males who can honk loudly. This accounts for the male’s peculiar appearance. Twice the weight of a female, he has a head that looks like a horse’s and a voice box that occupies more than half his body cavity. During the breeding season, males assemble to honk for several hours every evening and again every morning, and the females take their pick.

  But if being in a lek is so difficult, why am I suggesting you join one? Especially since you’ve already said you can’t cut it. There are a couple of reasons.

  The first is general. In many lekking species, females are attracted to groups more than they are to males all by themselves—and the larger the lek, the more pronounced the attraction. Since you obviously won’t attract any females by yourself, you have nothing to lose by joining one. (Peacock leks, unlike leks in some other species, have room for fellows who lack sex appeal.)

  The second is more specific to your situation. You can be valuable if you find your brothers and half brothers and lek with them. Then, even if you personally never mate, you can help them attract mates just by being there. I know this sounds like a raw deal. But because you and your brothers share many of the same genes, you can pass on your genes by helping them to pass on theirs. So how will you find these brothers? Don’t worry about that. The peacock brotherhood recognizes its own, even when brothers have never met before. I cannot tell you how. As in any good secret society, the answer is (for now at least) known only to peacocks.

  In lekking with your brothers, you’re way ahead of most other lekking species. The only other species where brothers are known to lek with brothers is another bird, the black grouse. And you’re way ahead of other species’ gangs of ill-assorted hoodlums. Ask any mafioso: whatever your purpose, gangs of brothers are the most dependable. Lions are the most famous example of fraternal cooperation. Lionesses live in family groups and rear their cubs in a joint litter. A lion’s success in siring cubs depends on how long he can stay with a particular family of lionesses. And that depends on how many lions he’s working with. The larger the coalition of lions, the longer they hold on to a pride. And it turns out that coalitions of more than three are always composed of littermates—brothers, half brothers, and an occasional cousin. (Pairs of lions may or may not be related; threesomes are either three littermates or two littermates and a stranger.) This means that brothers and cousins born at the same time—whether small or large, weak or strong—will have a much better chance of having children later on. Likewise, lionesses who give birth to several sons at once will have more grandchildren: their sons will be able to form larger coalitions.