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Discoblog
« Steve Jobs to Gawker: What Have You Done for the World, Anyway?
NCBI ROFL: Gentlemen prefer blonde hitchhikers. »

A Scientist Finds out That Discussion of Bat Fellatio Is NSFW

fruit-batAccording to Dale Evans, a professor at University College Cork in Ireland, he just wanted to bring up an interesting tidbit of animal behavior while chatting with a colleague. But the journal article he referenced, “Fellatio in fruit bats prolongs copulation time,” didn’t just cause raised eyebrows, it also prompted a sexual harassment complaint.

New Scientist reports:

As part of what he says was an ongoing discussion on human uniqueness, Evans showed a copy of the fellatio paper to a female colleague in the school of medicine. “There was not a shred of a sign of offence taken at the time,” Evans says. “She asked for a copy of the article.” A week later he got a letter informing him that he was being accused of sexual harassment.

The female colleague later said that she asked for a copy of the article only to cut short the conversation, which she found disgusting and offensive. Let’s just hope that she didn’t take a look at the video the original researchers put together of the bats in action.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Chimps Use Tools to Improve Their Sex Lives
Discoblog: Endangered Frogs Encouraged to Get Amorous in an Amphibian “Love Shack”
80beats: With Chirps and Trills, Bats Sing Love’s Sweet Song
80beats: The Original Bat-Signals: Bats Can Recognize Individual Voices

Image: flickr / MDL.hu

Share

May 17th, 2010 4:07 PM Tags: animal sex, bats, sex, sexual harassment
by Eliza Strickland in Sex & Mating, The Wide (& Strange) World of Animals | 2 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

  • john smith

    So, where’s the video?

  • http://discover Nancy

    I’m sorry but I think there was more to this story than was written. Was there a “history” of problems between these two? Furthermore, whatever happened to simply saying, “I find this offensive, please change the subject.”





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      Discoblog also includes the daily feature NCBI ROFL, in which two prone-to-distraction grad students post real scientific articles with funny subjects. Email your tips to ncbirofl [at] gmail.com. Follow the ROFL feed here.

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