From: Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
>So much for "lizard dignity" I guess. I think we should outlaw this
>form of reproduction immediately! :-)
>http://www.desertmuseum.org/asdmpress/natural_history/reptiles/cloeonyx.html
Here's another in the "strange-animal-reproduction-department"
(From my old "Stranger Than Fiction Department" page:
http://www.amara.com/stranger/str_fiction.html
The reference for this particular piece was from an article in the
science section of the San Jose Mecury News 5 or 6 years ago.)
Austrailia's Great Barrier Reef:
"The flatworm Pseudoceros bifurcus is no romantic. When it wants sex,
it simply rears up and stabs its mate with its penis. Because it a
hermaphroditic species, its mate has a penis too, so it may get a jab
in return. This leads to an unusual foreplay ritual that its
discoverers in Germany have dubbed penis fencing.
Nicolaas Michiels and Leslie Newman of the Max Planck Institute for
Behavioural Physiology in Seewiesen stumbled upon the 6-centimeter
worm in the sea off Heron Island at the southern end of Austrailia's
Great Barrier Reef. For 20 hours they observed 16 pairs of worms,
which they had housed in ice-cream tubs.
At first, the animals were unable to find each other and did
nothing. But when the worms happened to meet, they started sexual
fencing bouts that lasted up to an hour. The two animals would sit up
and try to inject sperm into each other. Only about one out of six
strikes leads to successful insemination, says Michiels, who calls the
behavior "brutally inefficient." The animals are left severely
wounded, with prominent punctures."
--******************************************************************* Amara Graps, PhD | Max-Planck-Institut fuer Kernphysik Heidelberg Cosmic Dust Group | Saupfercheckweg 1 +49-6221-516-543 | 69117 Heidelberg, GERMANY Amara.Graps@mpi-hd.mpg.de * http://galileo.mpi-hd.mpg.de/~graps ******************************************************************* "Never fight an inanimate object." - P. J. O'Rourke
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