Friday Weird Sex Blogging

In a time-crunch like this, one can always count on Buzz Skyline to save the day.....
I've been lazy over the holidays with my blogging, so I'll defer, once again, to Physics Of Sex blog: Part 2 of Pumped Up and Ready for Love: Sex and Fluid Physics And once the flow gets going, you may want to make sure that your toys are ethical.
Teaching circulatory physiology is pretty much the same as teaching fluid physics. It can get a bit tough and boring. But, if it is taught like this, I bet ther would be no students sleeping in the back row and failing the tests....
This does not have much to do with circadian oscillations, or even the daily rhythms of human mating, but a much faster rhythm of human mating - you know what I'm talking about... The fascinating new blog, The Physics of Sex, explains the physics in great detail and gives you ideas for your own home science experiments.
I mean, er, an entomologist with a keen interest in insect sex? If so, you can buy this cool poster (pdf). More info on the poster is here. Shopping info is here.
As seen on Facebook (I could not find the originals anywhere online - if you do, please let me know so I can attribute it correctly):
...and it will stay hard for another 4 hours. [That is Friday Weird Sex Blogging for this week....]
Since I already posted, earlier in the week, the weirdest and most disgusting animal sex post ever, instead of writing a new one, I'll just send you to see some cute ladybug sex (scroll down to the middle of the post), which also reminded me of these pictures I dicovered a few months ago. Or another one, picked up randomly on the web:
What?.... There is a slang phrase in Serbo-Croatian that means "doing nothing; being idle; wasting time", and it is "hladiti jaja", which means "cooling (one's) balls". So, if you see a guy just sitting there, clutching a beer bottle and gazing into the distance, you may ask him "Hey, man, whatcha doin'?" and he may reply " 'ladim jaja", i.e., "I'm coolin' me balls". Well, this slang phrase, indicating a thermoregulatory behavior, has its origin in the real theromoregulatory physiology. Yes, mammals have to cool their balls. That is why mammalian testes are located outside the body inside…
I had several ideas for today's edition that I thought were really great, until I saw this. There is nothing I can write today that can get any better. I know when I am outcompeted and I bow to His Tentacled Majesty. I'll try something better next week....
Well, this Friday Weird Sex Blogging is not going to be so unique. After all, Janet and Zuzu have already blogged about it, but who can resist a phallic-looking, rotten-meat smelling, fly-attracting flower! And it is not a B-grade movie on the sci-fi channel. This is real! The Titan Arum (Amorphophallus titanum), in all its 3m tall glory is about to start stinking up the greenhouse at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden (follow the flowering on the blog or watch the flowering web-cam here) :
We have recently covered interesting reproductive adaptations in mammals, birds, insects, flatworms, plants and protists. For the time being (until I lose inspiration) I'll try to leave cephalopod sex to the experts and the pretty flower sex to the chimp crew. In the meantime, I want to cover another Kingdom - the mysterious world of Fungi. And what follows is not just a cute example of a wonderfully evolved reproductive strategy, and not just a way to couple together my two passions - clocks and sex - but also (at the very end), an opportunity to post some of my own hypotheses online.…
As always, animal porn is under the fold: You have probably heard that a female praying mantis eats her mate's head during the mating process. You may imagine the process to go something like this: Actually, there are many species of praying mantises and in most of them sexual cannibalism is quite rare. It occurs much more often in the laboratory than out in the field. Apparently, the lights and sounds of a laboratory are stressful to the female so she acts aggressively in response. The praying mantises are very aggressive predators and they can eat quite a lot of food, preferring soft-…
According to the referrers pages of my Sitemeter, a lot of you are excited by strange penises, strange penises, strange penises and strange penises (or something like it). So, today we have to move to a different topic, traffic-be-damned, for those without phallic fixations. So, read on.... If science is all you care for you can skip to the bottom of the post because the main character of today's story will be introduced with a poem (also found here): The Conjugation of the Paramecium by Muriel Rukeyser This has nothing to do with propagating The species is continued as so many are (among…
You should check out all of my SiBlings' Friday Blogging practices, then come back here for a new edition of Friday Weird Sex Blogging. Last week you saw an example of a corkscrew penis. But that is not the only one of a kind. See more under the fold... Some birds also have spiral tools. For instance, see this 20-cm penis of an Argentine lake duck (Oxyura vittata) (from this paper: The 20-cm Spiny Penis of the Argentine Lake Duck (Oxyura vittata) (pdf)): The same author, Dr Kevin McCracken of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, later found an even longer one in the same species. It was…
You really think I am going to put this above the fold? No way - you have to click: Today's lesson is on the reproductive anatomy of the domestic pig (Sus scrofa domestica), which probably applies to the wild species in the pig family as well. Although we may reflexively think about invertebrates when pondering diversity of copulatory organs, mammals are not too bad in that department either. After all, the sperm is delivered in some species into the vagina (e.g., dog), in others into the cervix (e.g., pig) and in yet others into the uterus (e.g., horse), so different strategies are needed…
Some flatworms, for instance these pretty Pseudobiceros hancockanus, engage in penis fencing. Both individuals are hermaphrodites, i.e., have both male and female organs. The penis is white, pointed and two-headed. Both individuals are trying to inseminate the other. The one who is inseminated has to bear and lay eggs - a more expensive proposition. The one who "won" the fencing bout and did the insemination can move on and fence some other guys and on and on, "fathering" many progeny until happenning onto a better fencer, getting inseminated, and spending the rest of the life as "…
There is a tradition in the blogosphere of posting something light on Fridays. Some people do the Friday Random Ten, but I do not have an iPod, and keep my computer on Mute, so I do not listen to music or can generated a random ten. Most people post pictures of variousanimals, mostly cats, but I do not like doing what everyone else is doing. And once I've posted pictures of my cats (and I did, a couple of times, though never on a Friday), what's the point of doing it again? Some people got away from cats and pets and post pictures of cooler animals, like ants, or, well, ants. birds. Or…