On Animal Orgies and other Curious Strategies (and a little bit on my news habit.)

      First, a confession:  I was sorta kinda thinking I wanted to write something about the government-gone-wild romp through crazy-town which is, in case you haven’t had a pulse for two weeks, is the season’s newest and most disturbing reality show on the air right now, but Gina made me swear off news for the weekend because it leaves me twitchy and bug-eyed, and so I have been doing my weak-willed best to be obedient. She is off corralling children and horses on the other side of New Hampshire but her Spidey sense can pick up even the faintest whiff of political drudge on me, and she’ll know if I’ve been cheating.  Which leads me to my second confession.

            Really, and All Things Considered (Didja catch that?), I could be doing a lot worse. And most of it has been second hand, since I am up at Joy Farm with my folks who are a couple of incurable news junkies. The house is filled with NPR, and anywhere my mother goes, opaque clouds of Politico positively waft off her. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t take a deep sniff now and then.

Joy Farm. For Health and Wellness.

 But I’ve been trying to be good. I really have. Until this morning, when I noticed with horror that I was idly thumbing through my BBC app. I realized what I was doing before I went all the way into the US section, thank goodness, which surely would have wrenched me fully off the wagon and sent me square back into the muddy gutter of political filth. But on my bender, I did espy a juicy little story, and let’s be honest: What could be more delightful to write about (and read about) than stories of animals whose epic sexcapades literally kill them.

Just a prelude:  the study I am about to relate, which is about marsupial orgies, was published in a journal called Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS. Um, how do you pronounce that again?

 Anyway, according to their study, some cute marsupial species have these tantric level sex fests because the number of times in a year when a female is willing/able/open to mating is exactly once.  And moreover the females have “synchronized their reproductive cycles” which means they all want it at the same time. So this narrow window of opportunity produces, when the time is ripe, an explosion of marsupial Don Juans on the scene. There’s a lot of wooin’ to be done, stat. Everyone tries to get it while the getting’s going on. (But it’s only the females that are “highly promiscuous” in the BBC’s report. Even though both male and female alike are in a mad dash to stuff and be stuffed with as much sperm as they can manage because for the males, it improves the likelihood of passing on their genes, and for the females, it insures against them having to scramble their own DNA with only the genetic dregs of some loser marsupial simply because he got there first). This romp fest triggers hormones, unsurprisingly, and lots of them. One of the hormones it triggers is the stress hormone, which goes into haywire feedback mode, meaning it doesn’t shut off ever. It just ramps up and ramps up because there is no brake for it anymore. This means the more a male does the dirty, the higher his stress levels go, and the higher his stress levels go, the more vigorously and intensely he is driven to mate. Until eventually the stress kills him. It’s a case of mass suicide-by-sex.  Though such strategies are not super uncommon, they generally remain the provenance of insects, fish, and other unhuggable/not particularly cute creatures but the authors note it can be useful for dense populations, and for these marsupials, it might also come down to food. When food is plentiful but once a year, it helps enormously if half your population suddenly stops needing to be fed just as resources become scarce.

            In other fatal sex maneuvers, I recently learned something about honeybees: The male honeybee, or drone, leads a pretty much feckless existence. Okay, that I knew. I knew that they don’t gather pollen, they don’t make honey, they don’t even lift an antenna to clean up the hive or construct it.  And I also knew (or at least it didn’t surprise me to learn, which is pretty much the same thing, right?) that they probably contributed something to the whole perpetuation of their species. I just didn’t ever think to dwell on the particulars of the event. But it turns out, I should have, because it's fascinating.

 So, spoiler alert: soon-to-be-queen bees have a lot in common with female marsupials re: mating windows, duration of. And, like the male marsupial, the opportunity to mate with a queen is literally a once-in-a lifetime experience for a drone. And like marsupials, Mademoiselle bee also doesn’t want to be stuck with the dregs of apianity (the bee equivalent of humanity. I might have just made that word up. Sorry.)  So she’ll mate with however many drones she feels like. So far honey bees share a lot in common with Marsupials. Can you guess how it’s going to end?  But do you know how?

            Well, I’m glad you asked! It turns out, the force of insemination is so powerful, it actually and literally blasts the poor drone in half, severing his penis (and abdominal muscles) from his body. The former serves as a sort of sperm plug inside the (queened) bee while the latter floats lifelessly to the ground, his glorious and genetically fruitful act having snuffed him out in a burst of glory.           

           

I hope you all feel edified now. Goodness knows, I do.