Human dating rituals may often seem strange, confusing and not-at-all productive. But the next time you’re wondering if you should wait three days to call, or if you talked too much at dinner, be thankful you aren’t worried you would become dinner.
A male praying mantis approaches a female. Excited, he flaps his wings and sways his abdomen. Once he is on her back, he begins to mate. Then, she bites off his head - Is this a love story, or a ghoulish bedtime tale?
When Female Chinese mantises consume their mates, they acquire important amino acids that are then incorporated into the eggs they lay. They also appear to lay twice as many eggs after cannibalising a male than they normally would. So while the male would probably be better off to live and mate with multiple females, at least it seems his nutrients give his DNA an elevated chance of getting passed on to the next generation.
The praying mantis, black widow spider, and jumping spider are among a number of species that devour their mates but lets hold dwelling into sexual cannibalism for a while and talk about some wacky dates :)
Lets wear a short skirt to the dance floor
Famous for their dance moves, male bird of paradise put a lot of effort into attracting females. Dances are inherited from fathers and then practised and refined throughout their life ready for mating. Males push their feathers up to form a sort of skirt before performing a dance for females that watch from above.
Role reversal
In a Clown Fish colony the largest female mates with the largest male. If the female dies, the male becomes female and becomes the new breeding female in the colony.
Lets take a flight of Fantasy together
Impressively, for honey bees, mating occurs in mid-flight. But, it is not something males get to do more than once as they die shortly after as their reproductive organ and abdominal tissue are ripped from their body and left in the female!
Can I have your drink please?
For giraffes, it is important to find out whether a female is ready to mate before attempting to do so. The way a male does this, however, is not appealing – he drinks her urine. Once he knows she is ready, he may need to fight off competition, which he does by swinging his long neck at the other suitor.
Love dart
Snails are hermaphrodites, so have both male and female organs. But rather than competing with each other to decide who gets to be the male, both snails are impregnated. This isn’t the only strange thing about the way snails mate though; sperm is injected by stabbing the other snail with a sharp reproductive organ, nicknamed a love dart.
Artistic lover
Attracting females is hard work if you are male pufferfish. Rather than just sitting and waiting for females, males spend days creating symmetrical patterns in the sand that can reach up to 2 m in diameter. If happy with the male’s creation, the female will lay her eggs in the centre of the circle.
I come bearing gifts
Nothing says “I love you” to a nursery web spider like a little bundle of food wrapped in pretty, white silk. The males bring their gifts to females as a request to mate.The female inspects the parcel, and if she accepts, he mates with her while she unwraps and eats the meal. Except the male often lies. If he gets hungry before he brings the gift, he sucks out the food and presents a beautifully-wrapped exoskeleton. Sometimes they don’t even bother with an exoskeleton, they use a twig. Sometimes the females weighs it, but is still fooled by how pretty the wrapping is. When she finds out, the relationship ends. Immediately.
The sneaky lover
Many fish species have what biologists call territorial males and sneaker males. The territorial ones will defend their females and eggs from another approaching, aggressive male. The sneakers, which are typically smaller, weaker males, will wait on the outskirts and approach right when the female lays eggs.
But bluegills have a third category of male breeding behaviour called female mimics, which are generally older sneaker males. They look and mimic like females and can get close to a territorial male who is trying to fertilise the eggs. The territorial mail will think he is getting another female while the sneaker mimic gets lucky with the female when opportunity presents itself.
One body multiple souls
Allow me to share a comic strip on this wonderful species.
Credits: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/angler
Food is money
Quantity is key in this relationship. The male hangingfly must find a large enough insect to keep his chosen female busy eating while he mates with her. It takes about 20 minutes for her sperm storage organ to fill.
If she runs out of food before he’s done, she kicks him off and sends him packing, but if her storage unit fills up before she is done eating the insect, He’s no longer interested in mating her and will take the food and regift it to someone else.
Not all money is food
Not all gifts involve food. A male Adelie penguin, living along the Antarctic coast, collects little rare rocks to present to his beloved. The female uses the rocks to line her nest, and if she likes the rock, she will allow him to mate with her. Unfortunately for the poor male, if he wanders off and another male presents a rock, she will mate with him, too.
Pick me up at the Bar
Imagine a bar in a rural town packed with testosterone-filled men puffing their chests and doing their best to run each other off. Now put that bar in the middle of the western sage brush and swap out humans for a chicken-sized brown bird called sage grouse.
Each year, male grouse gather on leks to fan their tail feathers like peacocks, blow up their chests and make strange popping sounds in hopes of attracting a mate. Female grouse wander in, appear ambivalent and decide, or not, on the right mate. Dozens or even hundreds can gather at the same time, only to finish by mid-morning, wander in to the sage and wait until the next day.
The lesbian lovers
Mating rituals for New Mexican Whiptail Lizard are particularly interesting, because there aren’t any. The entire New Mexican whiptail lizard species found in the southwest U.S. and Mexico is exclusively female.The species resulted from a hybridisation of two other lizards, and because it has double the chromosomes as other lizard species with males and females, can maintain its genetic diversity, But even though they are only females and don’t need males to reproduce, they still engage in simulated sex, And the ones that do engage in simulated sex have more babies.
The flashy ones
Fireflies are the flashy lovers of the insect world. At night, you can see them coming because each little bug shines like a lamp.
The lamplight of fireflies is generated by an enzyme inside the bugs’ abdomens called luciferase, which reacts with other elements and compounds to produce a cold light. This turns each individual firefly into a bioluminescent beauty.
Their glow is also used for courtship. Males of different firefly species use different flash patterns to attract potential mates. A male firefly will flash in a certain pattern for a particular length of time; he knows whether the female he’s spotted is interested based on how long it takes her to flash in reply.
This all sounds very romantic and beautiful. But there’s a dark secret lurking behind the facade: some female fireflies dupe the males with false flash patterns – then, when their amorous would-be partners approach, they attack and eat them. The femme fatales aren’t doing this from malice or hunger: they’re trying to ingest a toxin that will keep them safe from predators.
Lets make love till we die!
Lets have a closer look at the reproductive strategy called semelparity, or suicidal reproduction, in which animals concentrate all their reproductive energies into one bout of mating before death.
The poster child for this phenomenon is the male antechinus, a tiny, short-lived Australian mammal. The critter goes on a mad mating spree (sometimes as long as 14 hours), after which it suffers a fatal immune system breakdown and dies a ragged wreck.
You could call it a parental sacrifice: Antechinus males die knowing they'd spread their sperm far and wide.
The awkward lovers
If you’re trying to figure out the sex of a mammal, there’s usually one surefire place to look—unless that animal is a hyena. Female hyenas aren’t only larger and more aggressive than their male counterparts, but they have pseudo penises. Males have to perform quite an awkward balancing act in order to get their actual penis into the female’s faux one. If it’s a successful mating, she’ll have to push pups through the fake phallus as well. No wonder hyenas are always laughing!
Monogamous relationships
When monogamous relationships come to mind, we typically think of geese, swans or humans. Rarely do we think of prairie voles. But the tiny mammals are actually quite faithful and affectionate. When they are stressed they hug and kiss each other. They spend 50 to 60 percent of their time together, if not more. If any other males or females approach, the couple will chase them away.
The mate munchers
Other than praying mantis sexual cannibalism is prevalent among many species
Female black widows are perhaps the most notorious “mate munchers.” Males have to place themselves between the female’s fangs to get in the right position for mating, and are sometimes devoured upon completing their assignment. Clearly this eight-legged femme fatale has earned the name “black widow.”
Female jumping spiders can also be dangerous lovers. To attract a mate, male jumping spiders do a complicated courtship dance, and if their performance is flawed, they are not just rejected — they are also liable to end up as dinner. The continuation of the species is positive proof that death by sex is a successful evolutionary strategy. By surrendering themselves to their mates, males achieve the goal of mating — passing on their genes.
Fear not guys — it’s not do or die for all males in the animal kingdom. Some animals just have to practice their push-ups. :)
When it comes to sexual behaviour, we sometimes fall into a rather Victorian stereotype of the sexes: males are considered dominant, strong and aggressive, whereas females are described as submissive, weak and passive. However, these stereotypes at best fail to capture the reality of male-female sexual interactions or at worst are just plain wrong. The males of the Animal Kingdom go nuts trying to woo opposite sex, but one day, a long long time ago, there was a woman who didn’t complain, criticise, or nag…but like I said, it was a long long time ago and just for a day...Leaving all men with a video to watch with your partner and relate at best to the predicaments we face almost daily in our life.
Darling let me build a perfect home for you - Bowerbirds