Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation

by Olivia Judson

  Ewes are not the only ones to draw the short straw. Female frogs can have a terrible time. Take the quacking frog, an Australian species named for the quacking sounds that males make to attract mates. Like many other frogs, females come to pools to spawn. If all goes well, girl frog meets boy frog, he climbs on her back and wraps his arms around her—a classic froggie hug called amplexus. She releases eggs into the water; he squirts them with sperm. But if she has the misfortune to attract several males, they will push and shove as they jockey for position. At best, fewer of her eggs will be fertilized; at worst, she’ll asphyxiate in their embrace. Such tragedies are not unique: female wood frogs who attract several males occasionally drown in the ensuing melee.

  But better drowned than dismembered, I say. In some solitary bees and wasps, males emerge from the winter earlier than females do and gather around burrows that females will emerge from. When a female does emerge, she may be dismembered and killed as the boys struggle to possess her. Female yellow dung flies go to fresh cowpats to mate and lay eggs. If they get set upon by several males they, too, may be torn apart—or drowned in runny excrement. Perhaps dismemberment is better than I thought.

  Meanwhile, once a year, female northern elephant seals gather on beaches to give birth, nurse their pups, and fornicate before going back to sea. On many beaches, the biggest males—and when I say big, I mean five meters (sixteen feet) long and weighing over two and a half tons—can keep smaller males out of the main female arena. But these young males are raring to go. If they spot a female making her way back to the sea, they will gallop over to her—and in their desperation to mate, may batter her to death and then fight for the corpse. Hawaiian monk seals, the only wholly tropical seals, are one of the most endangered seals in the world, with perhaps six hundred animals left in the wild. Unfortunately, the biggest threat to their survival is … other Hawaiian monk seals. The main cause of death is attacks by adult males on adult females, who are often mobbed for hours by gangs of amorous males, during which they may be battered to death or badly bitten and then eaten by tiger sharks drawn to the commotion. The problem is so acute that male seals are being rounded up and given drugs to suppress their libidos in an attempt to save the species from extinction.

  All this must sound crazy. But the point is that none of the violence is intentional. The boys don’t mean to hurt the girls: it doesn’t do them any good if a girl dies before she’s had their children. So why are they so aggressive? It’s a catch-22. Things are most likely to turn sour when crowds of males hang about, all vying for favors from a few passing females. This is particularly likely if males congregate at places females must come to in order to breed or if a few males hold large breeding territories and the others lurk on the fringes. Then, it’s nothing ventured, nothing gained: if a fellow stands aside and doffs his cap to a girl, he’s guaranteed not to mate with her. Instead, he should rush in and press his suit. If he can beat off other contenders, he’ll have the chance to fertilize her eggs. The trouble is, the same is true for everyone—hence the scrum. If she dies as a result—well, that’s too bad. From his point of view, it’s as though someone else won her.

  From her point of view, the situation obviously looks different. No one wants to be dismembered, drowned, or battered to death, not least because death puts the kibosh on future reproduction. If the risk of coming to an untimely end—or being badly hurt—is appreciable, you’d expect females would evolve countermeasures. It’s the usual story. Some females may have attributes that make them less likely to be hassled, hurt, or killed. If these attributes have a genetic basis, the genes involved will spread. Having said that, when a girl is facing many males, there may be little she can do by way of self-defense. Even the greatest warriors can’t usually fight off several attackers at once or fight for days without rest.

  So what works? A popular solution is to hire a bodyguard. Female yellow dung flies, for example, prefer to mate with large males and are more likely to be left in peace if they do so. Female northern elephant seals who copulate with someone on their way to the ocean are then escorted down the beach—and are less likely to be attacked by anybody else. Among water striders—seemingly delicate insects that skate about on the surfaces of ponds and streams—a female will fight to rid herself of a pesky male if few males are around. If, however, fighting off one fellow will just mean hassle from another and another and another, she accepts whoever comes along first. His presence will squelch the ardor of others. Bodyguards can be useful even when one’s life is not at risk: when escorted by a male, female pheasants and pigeons spend more time eating and less time checking for predators or fending off other males than when they are on their own.

  But you, my busy friend, don’t need a bodyguard to protect you from harassment. In your species, males buzz about at predictable times and places. Better yet, there is no single place that you must go to. This means boys can’t lie in wait at a place you can’t avoid, so you can simply steer clear of them. If they’re out in force at one bed of flowers, visit another. That’s what most girls in your species do.

  And cheer up: there are occasions when the pack mentality can be turned to a girl’s advantage. Take the beewolf Philanthus basilaris. Beewolves are solitary wasps that hunt other bees and wasps. The males cluster together, each defending a small territory and making a pest of himself by chasing every passing insect in the hopes of finding the girl of his dreams. Poor bastards. They think they’re going to get laid, but instead they get laid to rest. Females exact a grisly revenge for unwanted attentions. Girls who have already mated sometimes visit male aggregations not to make dreams come true but to provide for their families: they come to collect males to put into their nests for the grubs to eat when they hatch. With males so eager to mate, it’s easy pickings. And a fellow who falls into the arms of one of these dames will discover a fate worse than death. He’ll be stung until he’s paralyzed but not dead—grubs like fresh meat—and then sealed into the nest until the grubs are ready to eat him alive. Revenge, it seems, is a dish best served cold.

  Dear Dr. Tatiana,

  I’m an Australian seaweed fly, and I’m a Sensitive New Age Guy. I know that no means no—but that doesn’t get me anywhere. The girls in my species are tough Sheilas: whenever I make friendly overtures I get beaten up. Why are they so hostile, and is there anything I can do about it?

  Mr. Nice Is Mr. Frustrated in Mallacoota Bay

  To hell with political correctness. In your species, no means yes. The girls are aggressive because they want you to overpower them; indeed, they refuse to have sex with anyone who cannot. So if you want to get some rumpy-pumpy, you’re going to have to put up with being kicked and bucked until your partner submits to you.

  For some creatures, violent sex is the norm. Crabeater seals—which, incidentally, eat not crabs but krill, small shrimp that live by the hundreds of millions in the chilly waters around Antarctica—bite each other savagely during sex, and both animals often end up drenched in blood. But although this looks nasty, it’s like a human raking fingernails down her lover’s back: the wounds aren’t serious and there doesn’t seem to be anything sinister going on. Why do they do it? Well, there’s no accounting for taste.

  A taste for violence has its hazards, of course. Rough love leaves many animals scarred by the experience. Elderly bull crabeater seals have scars all over their heads from years of female affection. When a bison bull mounts a cow, his front hooves strike her back, sometimes removing bits of skin. By the time she celebrates her eighth birthday, she’ll probably have a couple of bald spots as a result. (During copulation, she has to bear the full weight of her massive lover: as he ejaculates, he goes into a spasm that brings his rear hooves off the ground.) Among dugongs, vegetarian sea mammals that snuffle around beds of sea grass using horny pads on their lower lips to yank plants up by the roots, females occasionally sport scars on their backs from the male’s clumsy lovemaking.

  Worse, accidents happen. In the pygmy salamander, the
male plunges barbed teeth into the female’s neck before presenting his packet of sperm; on occasion, he gets stuck and cannot tear himself away. Among southern elephant seals—the males are even bigger than northern ones, reaching six meters (twenty feet) and weighing about four tons—a careless bull may bite the cow on the head instead of the neck, killing her by crushing her skull. Dog mink occasionally make a similar mistake, piercing the base of the bitch’s brain instead of grabbing the scruff of her neck. A male sea otter’s idea of a kiss is a bite on the nose; this can be lethal if the wound gets infected.

  Such disasters grab attention: bad news always does. But it’s important to keep things in perspective. The crucial difference between these accidents and those at the hands of a libidinous mob is that these accidents are not a result of males acting in their self-interest. A male who goes about crushing his lovers’ skulls won’t leave many offspring. Thus, in species where girls are unlikely to be assaulted by a gang, the risk of being killed during sex will generally be trivial in comparison with the risk of dying in other ways, and avoiding such accidents will be a matter of luck, not evolution. That’s because genes that could protect you from having your skull crushed—for instance, genes that build stronger skulls—won’t spread if skull crushing is vanishingly rare.

  But although dead girls can’t have kids, injured girls might—it depends on the injury. So perhaps these accidents are more pernicious than they seem: what’s to stop a fellow from thrashing a girl within an inch of her life, especially if a walloping puts her off sex and stops her cheating on him? Girls, fear not, they wouldn’t get away with it for long. If, for whatever reason, lovemaking carried a real risk of serious injury, you would again expect the rapid evolution of traits that protect you from harm.

  Consider two examples. The first comes from sharks. In these monsters, sex is often brutal. The male grabs the female in his jaws while attempting to insert one of his penises, or “claspers,” which are pelvic fins rolled into tubes. (Males have two claspers. They lie parallel to his belly, one end touching his genital opening, the other poised to insert into the female. During copulation, sperm from the genital opening enter a clasper and are propelled into the female with a jet of seawater.) Grown-up females are often scarred or missing bits of fin. However, although I wouldn’t want to be bitten by a shark—even one in a tender mood—if you’re a girl shark, it’s not that bad. Take the blue shark. Mature females often have fresh bites or scars on their bodies. But they can handle it: when females go through puberty, their skin starts to thicken up; by the time they are adults, they have skin twice as thick as that of a male of the same size—and more telling, their skin is thicker than his teeth are long. In the round stingray, a cousin of sharks, not only does the female have thicker skin, the male has special pointy teeth to hold her with. Whereas females and young males have an array of smooth teeth that fit together like the stones on a well-paved street, a mature male has spiky teeth to give his love bites more oomph. And sometimes it’s the female who bites the male—and the male who has evolved to reduce the risk. Falcatus falcatus is a shark known only from fossils that are about 320 million years old. The male would be laughed out of the water by today’s sharks: on his head he was adorned with a large handle, a modified fin that curved forward over his head, giving him the appearance of a shark-shaped flatiron. Judging by the compromising position in which one fossil couple was found, it looks as if the handle evolved for the female to bite during sex.

  My second example of the evolution of countermeasures comes from the marine flatworm Pseudoceros bifurcus, a hermaphrodite. Among hermaphrodites, every member of the species is a potential mate; conventional fighting between rivals competing for mates does not exist. Indeed, for many hermaphrodites, sex is an amorous, drawn-out affair. But not for Pseudoceros bifurcus. In this species, individuals apparently prefer the male role over the female role, for they have evolved a technique of hit-and-run insemination. This involves stabbing the penis anywhere into the victim’s body before gliding off with all possible speed. But since being stabbed in this way inflicts a gaping wound, any individual who can defend itself gains an immediate advantage. The result? Penis fencing.

  As in all fencing, combatants try to hit without being hit; fighting is not to the death but to penetration. Duels can last for an hour, with each contestant striking and lunging, ducking and riposting. It’s quite a sight. The creatures look like tiny Persian rugs—flat (obviously) and adorned with intricate and colorful repeating patterns. When they swim, they look like flying carpets. When they fence they look like invisible men dueling under long capes. A duel ends when one animal succeeds in stabbing the other with its penis. This is still not pleasant, but at least the loser put up a fight.

  I hope I’ve convinced you that a bit of slap and tickle isn’t necessarily sinister. Indeed, to come back to your case, male seaweed flies gather important information during mating tussles. Discriminating males do not mate with every female they overpower. Instead, they mate only with the most vigorous. The reason, it turns out, is that the most vigorous females are those who are most able to survive. No one knows why the males are so fussy. But one possible reason is that seaweed—which is where females lay eggs—appears on beaches unpredictably. Therefore, the more robust females should have a better chance of living long enough to see seaweed arrive with the tide. So don’t be shy. Get in there and beat the girls into submission.

  Dear Dr. Tatiana,

  I’m a sagebrush cricket, and I’ve just molted into manhood. While checking out my new manly body, I noticed some teeth on my back. This strikes me as a funny place to have teeth. What are they for?

  Don’t Know Much about Anatomy in the Rockies

  Have you heard of a gin trap? It’s a trap with spring-loaded jaws held open in a big toothy grin. When an animal steps on the trigger the jaws slam shut, the teeth seizing the quarry so it has no hope of wriggling free. Trappers once used gin traps to catch bears, wolves, mink, sable, and the like. In eighteenth-century Britain, these traps were even used to catch men. I’m not joking: giant steel gin traps were erected to catch poachers bent on filching game from the estates of aristocratic gentlemen.

  Nowadays, happily, gin traps for mink and man alike are largely outlawed. But Mother Nature pays no attention to such niceties. The teeth on your back are a gin trap for catching girls. Here’s how it works. In your species, it’s traditional for the girl to be on top. When you curve your back upward to link genitalia, the flexion of your back causes the teeth of the gin trap to close on her belly, holding her fast. Once caught, she has to have sex with you whether she wants to or not. That’s right. The gin trap enables you to rape her.

  Why would you do that? Well, it’s an ugly world. Female sagebrush crickets have a wicked habit of their own: they drink your blood. You’ve probably noticed that as well as the gin trap, you have another odd bit of anatomy, a pair of soft, fleshy hind wings. You wouldn’t get far if you tried to fly with them. No, I’m afraid they seem to have evolved for females to nibble. During sex, she takes a bite or two from your wings, then laps up the blood that oozes forth. Afterward, the blood dries and your hind wings become weird mutilated sculptures. Females naturally prefer virgins because only virgins are intact; after all, who wants someone else’s chewed goods? But such picky behavior creates a problem for you males, who are naturally keen to mate more than once. That’s why when a female climbs on your back to check the state of your hind wings, you grab her with the trap. If you’re a virgin, it doesn’t make a difference—she’d have sex with you anyway. But if your hind wings have been chomped, it’s the gin trap that makes her stay.

  Don’t worry, you’re not alone in having a device to seize unwilling girls. Look at scorpionflies, insects with long, clear gossamer wings splotched with black. Male scorpionflies have a “notal organ,” a clamp on their abdomen that they use to hold females down. As in your case, the notal organ is used in all matings; but again, it only becomes a weapon when a
male is trying to hold a female against her will. What determines a female’s willingness? Whether or not the male can provide a good meal.

  Scorpionflies have an old-fashioned mating system: he pays for supper, she puts out. Because scorpionflies are among the vultures of the insect world—they are scavengers, feeding on insect carrion—a classy male will serve up a nice dead insect. Females readily copulate with males who can offer such a gourmet meal, but dead insects are often scarce. To get one a male may have to resort to stealing from a spider—a dangerous occupation. (Tip: If you’re a boy scorpionfly, you’ll have a big, bulbous penis. If you’re in a spider’s larder and the owner tries to stop you, whack her with your member and she’ll back off. Girls, if you ever find yourselves in the same predicament, your best bet is to head butt the poor spider.)

  If a male cannot obtain an insect by means fair or foul, he uses his salivary glands to secrete a large gelatinous lump—yummy. Not as yummy as an insect but not bad. Some males, however, are not up to secreting the lump and don’t fancy burgling a spider. Consequently, they have nothing to offer females and resort to force.

  In both sagebrush crickets and scorpionflies, rape is the work of the ultimate loser, the fellow on the edge of society who can spread his genes in no other way. You see, in these species, it’s better to make love to a willing female than to a furious, struggling, resisting one—males with willing partners copulate for longer, transfer more sperm, and sire more children. But if you’re a male with nothing to offer, you won’t be able to seduce anyone—and coercion is your only option. Indeed, natural selection discriminates against well-behaved losers. If you’ve nothing to offer and you don’t resort to force, you won’t have any children and your well-behaved genes will perish when you do.