Blogs / Discoblog

If you thought going to the club was bad, imagine having to dance in front of potential mates for over an hour and a half, lest they will eat you. Male Australian redback spiders, members of the black widow family, pay the ultimate price if their mating dance doesn’t impress.

Here’s how it works, via Livescience.com:

Males, which are just 1 percent to 2 percent of a female’s body weight, dance about the web of a potential mate, plucking at the threads and sending out vibrations. Once the male redback has performed an adequate dance, the female will allow him to mount her and insert one of his two palps, or copulatory organs, into one of a pair of sperm storage organs. The male then somersaults to place its abdomen directly above his mate’s fangs. That’s perfect positioning for the female to begin devouring the male’s body.

To avoid being gobbled up by the female halfway through mating, males need to dance for 100 minutes, according to new research. But the dancing males better have a good internal clock. Females can’t determine the source of courtship, so if the dancer exceeds the optimal time, a slick male could sneak in a mate with the female while the dancer ends up alone on the web.

For a video of the life-or-death dance, click on over to the Discovery News.

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Image:  Ken Jones

A woman in Arkansas is pregnant with two babies at the same time…except they aren’t twins. ABC News reports:

Doctors successfully located Todd and Julia Grovenburg’s growing baby girl Jillian, but then discovered another smaller baby — what could be Jillian’s younger brother — growing beside her.

The Grovenburgs may have conceived their son Hudson a full two-and-a-half weeks after Jillian, according to statements given to KFSM-TV in Ft. Smith-Fayetteville, Ark.

There’s even a name for what happened: superfetation, or conceiving while pregnant. Unsurprisingly, it’s extraordinarily rare—one doctor said she could only track down 10 reported cases.

Granted, there’s a big problem—what happens to the younger baby when the older fetus is born?

“It [the second conception] can happen up to 24 days later than the first conception, and then you’re putting the second baby at risk for lung development problems,” said [OB-GYN Karen Boyle].

However, in the Grovenburg’s case, Boyle said the difference of two weeks would not put the younger baby at much of a risk for health problems.

Talk about dodging a bullet—though birthdays in the Grovenburg household should be interesting.

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Image: iStockphoto

“Really! I was born that way! I swear!” A new species of shark was discovered in California recently, called the Eastern Pacific black ghostshark. It’s part of a group known as big black chimeras, and members of the species have actually been laying around pickled in museums since the 1960s—but only recently have scientists realized that the black ghostsharks were in fact a separate species.

One possibility is that past scientists were too distracted by the sharks’, er, highly unusual feature that they lumped them in with the other chimeras.

Douglass Long, author of the study (PDF) detailing the new species, described the shark to National Geographic News:

Male chimeras…have retractable sexual appendages sprouting from their foreheads. These organs, which resemble a spiked club at the end of a stalk, may be used to stimulate a female or to pull her closer—though these are still assumptions, Long said.

So basically these guys have a mace swinging from their forehead that they use to club female sharks. Talk about a remarkable trick of animal mating.

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Image: MBARI

Yes, sex sells. But should it sell science? Anatomist Gunther von Hagens plans on opening a new kind of Body Exhibit, one that is akin to a sex show of dead corpses. The Swiss have already granted him the OK to set up the show in their country, as part of the Body Worlds exhibit. He’s tried to put it on before in Berlin, with a male and female corpse having sex, and met with protests. In response, he claimed that the two subjects had signed consent forms prior to their death, and agreed to have their bodies displayed in a sexual way.

Now, Reuters reports he’s ready for a full on show:

Von Hagens and his wife Angelina Whalley show corpses prepared using a technique invented by von Hagens called “plastination,” that removes water from specimens and preserves them with silicon rubber or epoxy resin.

“It’s not my intention to show certain sexual poses. My goal is really to show the anatomy and the function,” Body Worlds creative director Whalley told Reuters in an interview, adding the sex exhibition may open next year.

The regular Body World exhibit has racked up 27 million visitors, but constantly is called controversial for their use of corpses and dissection of skin and internal body parts. And while teaching about anatomy is a noble goal, is there really any educational purpose to this sex show? Or is von Hagens just very good at getting free press?

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Image: flickr/ dustinkeirstead

If you’re hoping to appear more attractive to potential mates, the solution may be simple: Just shower with some pheromone-laden body wash, or dab on some lip gloss containing these so-called “attraction chemicals.”

At least, that’s what the makers of an increasing number of pheromone-based products want you to believe. Body washes, cosmetics, perfumes, and more all boast of their pheromone contents. There’s just one problem: There is no scientific evidence that people produce or respond to pheromones at all, or that dabbing them on will make you more attractive to potential mates.

This dearth of scientific evidence didn’t dissuade Dial, however. The soap-maker recently released a “pheromone-infused” body wash, then held a speed-dating “experiment” in which nine blindfolded women had to choose between nine men (some had used the wash, some hadn’t) they would go out with in order to “prove” the wash worked.

The way someone smells can obviously affect how much you want to be around them; in fact, scent has even been shown to influence attraction. But it’s never been proven that humans can “smell” pheromones, and their purported effects are far from scientific fact. According to the New York Times:

“There has been a lot of misconception about what human pheromones do,” said Dr. Charles Wysocki, a behavioral neuroscientist at Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia and an author of “Human Pheromones: What’s Purported, What’s Supported,” a recently published report commissioned by the Sense of Smell Institute, a branch of the Fragrance Foundation. “We want to raise a flag and say, where’s the evidence? How human pheromones work is still totally questionable.”

At least we can take consolation in the noble cause the product developers have in mind:

“We don’t claim using our product you’re going to hit a home run,” said Ryan Gaspar, a [Dial] brand manager. “We say, ‘We’ll get you to first base.’”

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Image: flickr / lissalou66

Plenty of people love roller coasters—but few as much as Amy Wolfe, a 33-year-old Pennsylvania woman who plans to marry one.

Wolfe is the latest in a series of people who have married inanimate objects, from the Berlin Wall to the Eiffel Tower. This type of sexual behavior has a name: objectum sexual, meaning a person becomes attracted to, and even falls in love with, non-human (or even -animate) objects.

According to a perhaps-too-detailed report by The Metro U.K.:

[The woman] enjoys a “satisfying” sexual relationship with a fairground ride – a “magic carpet” themed ride named 1001 Nachts – and now plans to marry it. The 33-year-old rides the machine 300 times a year and uses pictures of it to satisfy herself at home.

Because she lives about 80 miles from the amusement park, the relationship has been long-distance. But even if Wolfe relocates to be closer to “her” ride, we’re willing to bet this marriage will have, er, more than its fair share of ups and downs.

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Image: flickr / Thomas Euler

Strangely enough, it makes sense: A study of red junglefowl, a close relative of chickens, found that males can “adjust the speed and effectiveness of their sperm by allocating more or less seminal fluid to copulations.” The determining factor in this remarkable change of speed is how attractive the male finds the female. According to Discovery News (not to be confused with DISCOVER):

The study…adds to the growing body of evidence that males throughout many promiscuous species in the animal kingdom, including humans, can mate with many females, but chances of fertilization are greater when the female is deemed to be attractive.

Desirable female red junglefowl are easy to identify.

“Female attractiveness is determined by the expression of a sexual ornament — the comb — which is phenotypically and genetically correlated to the number and mass of eggs females lay,” according to study co-authors Charlie Cornwallis of the University of Oxford and the Royal Veterinary College’s Emily O’Connor.

To collect their data, the researchers collected natural ejaculates from dominate and subordinate red junglefowl that had just mated with either an “attractive” or “unattractive” female. What the dedicated won’t do for science.

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The muriqui have a reputation as being one of the gentlest, most social of the primates—so much so that they’ve been dubbed the “hippy monkey.”But even the sweetest of animals will turn murderous when deprived of basic needs—in this case, sex. New Scientist reports that a gang of six muriqui was spotted pulling a “Lord of the Flies” on an older male:

The victim, an old male, died an hour after receiving savage bites to his face, body and genitals. The observations, published this week in the American Journal of Primatology, show how lifestyles may dramatically alter the behaviour of a species.

So why would these peaceful creatures, close relatives of spider monkeys found only in the Atlantic forests of Brazil, turn to such savagery? NS explains:

The muriqui’s peaceful reputation stems mainly from northern populations that feed on abundant leaves, and where males patiently queue to mate with females.

But in the southern population where the attack took place, fruit is more widely available than in the north, and this may provide a clue to the assault, says Mauricio Talebi of the Federal University of São Paulo-Diadema, Brazil, who led the research.

(more…)

Some expectant parents are so excited to see their new baby, they just can’t bear to wait nine months. Soon they may not have to, thanks to designer Jorge Lopes of London’s Royal College of Art, who has started making life-size models of unborn babies based on MRI and ultrasound images. ABC News tells us:

“I think we’re at the beginning of a new science, really,” said Stuart Campbell, who heads the obstetrics and gynecology department at King’s College London. “It’s the sort of technique that in the future could be done in a matter of hours. So that the couple could have a model in their hands in a few hours.”

Lopes can create models at various points throughout a pregnancy and has also done models of twins. “It’s amazing to see [a parent's] face when they can hold the models, when they can understand very well the size, the scale,” he said, holding up one of the models. “Something like this is only 12 weeks. It’s very nice to hold this, ‘Oh, this is your son.’”

Some say the models could help parents bond with baby before he or she is born.
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Friction and high levels of heat in the groin area, combined with the physical stress of intense training, greatly decreases the number of normal-looking sperm produced by male competitive cyclists, according to a Spanish study.

And we mean “greatly”: The researchers found that the sperm of triathletes who pedaled more than 186 miles per week was, on average, only 4 percent normally sized and shaped. That’s significantly lower than the 15 to 20 percent in the most fertile non-cyclists, and this low count could make conceiving difficult.

Cyclists, therefore, should consider freezing their sperm before commencing training, according to the BBC:

“Fifteen triathletes with an average age of 33 were asked not to have sex for three days before giving a sperm sample. When the results were compared with their training routines, only cycling – not swimming or running – was linked with sperm quality. All of the men – who had been training for an average of nine times a week for eight years – had less than 10% of normal looking sperm, compared with the 15-20% seen in the most fertile men. In those who managed more than 186 miles a week on their bikes, the proportion of sperm that was the correct size and shape had fallen to 4%, the point at which men may struggle to conceive without fertility treatment.

[Lead researcher Diana Vaamonde] added it was unclear whether sperm quality would improve if men retired from the sport but that after years of wear and tear this was unlikely. “Something which could be done would be to have their sperm frozen but when they start training they do not realise what damage can be done to their sperm.”

The researchers said that casual cycling, such as biking to and from work, likely would not negatively impact a man’s fertility. Let’s face it: Because obesity also can cause infertility, most men (and women) should be worried about spending more time on a bicycle, not less.

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Image: flickr/ donjd2