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Birds do it, bees do it ...

With Valentine's Day around the corner, just be glad you're not a male
spider
05:55 AM Feb 12, 2011
LONDON - Erica McAllister is excited. "Flies," she enthuses, "are the best, because they're
everywhere, and they do everything. They get up to the craziest stuff. Amazing genitalia.
And some wild strategies."
Downstairs in Britain's Natural History Museum's magnificently arched Jerwood Gallery,
staff are (ahem) mounting Sexual Nature, a new exhibition exploring the diverse and often
startling sexual and reproductive behaviour of animals (or, as the museum's posters coyly
put it, "nature's most intimate secrets").
It's the museum's first adult exhibition, aimed at those over 16, and containing what the
same publicity calls "frank information and imagery about sex", so everyone is, naturally,
quite excited.
"I'm looking forward to seeing visitors' reactions," says Richard Sabin, senior curator of
the museum's mammal group, from whose collections a number of specimens - including
a red deer stag, a hyena, chimpanzees and Guy the gorilla - have been selected for
display. "They'll have seen animal courtship on television, but nothing quite as, um,
graphic as here.
"What we hope is that it wipes away the whole thing about this being a taboo subject.
Because, of course, nothing could be more natural."
Natural it may be but animal reproduction can be a mighty strange business.
Barnacles, for instance, have a penis 30 times their body length. Male snakes have a
forked organ, allowing them to dodge the female's tail and penetrate from either direction.
Hedgehogs plug their partner's vagina with excess sperm to stop anyone else's getting a
look in. The female hyena picks and dumps her male as she sees fit, and has even
evolved genitalia that look like a male's.
Still, flies are best, says McAllister (she would - she's the museum's entomology
collections manager). The male stalk-eyed fly, she explains, "takes in air and its eyes
come out on stalks. Then it blows out again, and the stalks harden and set, for ever. And
it's the ones with the widest stalks that get the most action. Male antler flies do the same,
except they use their antlers to head-butt each other - to see off rivals".
There's not much to beat the mating ritual of the dance fly, though. "They're into gift-
giving," says McAllister. "The males catch a smaller fly and kind of dangle it in front of the
females as they dance. But they wrap the present up in a little silk balloon, so it takes her
a while to get at it - and while she's busy, he has his wicked way. Brilliant.
"And some of the males are even more devious. Once they've done the deed, if the gift
isn't finished they'll just take it back and give it to another girl. Like a half-eaten box of
Milk Tray, except it seems to work. And some really naughty ones haven't got a gift at all,
they just pretend. It's crazy stuff."
DARWIN'S TAKE ON SEX
The whole process, obviously, has a point. It's all about making sure it's your DNA that
get transmitted rather than anyone else's. It's this Darwinian process of sexual selection

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that's at the core of Sexual Nature.

"The point," says Tate Greenhalgh, the exhibition developer, "is that survival isn't always
the key to evolution; it's reproduction that really counts."
Take the peacock: The male's magnificent 2-m-long tail feathers are a major obstacle to
mobility and can be fatal when a predator pounces. But what's important is that those
same feathers appeal to the hens. So males have to prove not just good looks but good
health.
The cock's brilliant red comb, for instance, "takes an awful lot of testosterone to produce,
which inhibits its defence against disease - so a particularly fine specimen isn't merely
aesthetically pleasing, it shows the bird is rampant and very healthy".
Similarly, the gift-giving process isn't just about gentlemanly generosity; it could, in some
species, demonstrate a particular male's prowess at capturing prey and hence his capacity
to feed the couple's young.
When it comes to male mammals, says Sabin, the name of the game is generally to see
off potential rivals and have your pick of the available females. The monumental antlers
sported by the adult male moose - they can grow to a spread of up to 1.4m in a single
season - represent "a phenomenal amount of energy and resources, all devoted to
providing a convincing visual signal to males of your physical dominance and to females of
your gene quality".
If a male is sufficiently dominant, his reproductive kit need not be spectacular: Guy the
gorilla, the adult male silverback whose 185cm chest and monumental neck muscles made
him a favourite at London Zoo until he died 30-odd years ago, probably had a penis
measuring no longer than 3cm erect. As the alpha male, he had his harem and simply
didn't need to compete.
But even 3cm is gargantuan compared to what others have (or don't have). Adult male
spiders, explains Jan Beccaloni, an entomologist specialising in arachnids, do not have a
penis at all. Instead, they produce a sperm web, deposit their sperm on to the web, and
then draw it up into the palps (a pair of small, claw-like structures at the front of their
bodies).
They then slot their palps into the female "like a lock and key", Beccaloni says.
Compared with your average male spider, humans have it easy, she reckons. "Essentially,
the male has to make sure the female is in the mood to mate," she says. "He also has to
show her he's of the same species. And he has to demonstrate he's not food. If he gets
any of those three things wrong, he may well get eaten, because in most cases the
female is bigger than the male."
Some spiders are into gift-giving and, generally speaking, the bigger the gift, the longer
the copulation lasts. Male jumping spiders semaphore with their palps and body parts,
prompting a gender-specific female dance that sends the male into "a frenzy of sexual
anticipation".
For many male spiders the risk, of course, is that copulation necessitates placing his juicy
abdomen in front of his partner's jaws. But in evolutionary terms that "makes good
sense", says Beccaloni, "because males have a far shorter lifespan than females anyway,
and if they get eaten, that means he's been in the right position for longer and the
female's well-fed. In short, his genes will get passed on. He's not been wasted."
WHY ARE WE WATCHING THIS AGAIN?
Sexual Nature grew out of the phenomenal success of the museum's Darwin exhibition
last year, Greenhalgh says. "We're always popular with schoolchildren, with young parents
and older adults," she says, "but we wanted to broaden our audience to include more
young adults. We're hoping the playful tone and the frank language of this will appeal -
and the exhibits too, of course.

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"One of the first things visitors will see is some very explicit BBC footage of bonobos, the
so-called erotic apes, who have sex however and whenever they see the opportunity. It
seems to diffuse aggression. That pretty much sets the tone."
And can we learn anything about human sexual behaviour from all this? Greenhalgh is
cautious. "In terms of sexual selection, there's definitely something going on around
symmetry. A symmetrical face is important in the idea of human beauty.
"But otherwise there are so many different cultural and social and media norms: In
wealthy societies, for example, slim women are considered attractive; in poorer societies,
it's plumpness that's considered a sign of wealth and well-being.
"And, of course, the really big difference is that we humans have managed to put our
biology aside: Animals have sex to reproduce, we do it for pleasure. That's rather changed
our perspective." THE GUARDIAN

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