It can be hard to sleep with a light shining in your window, but for the male blue tit, this night-lighting gives him a sexual advantage. Researchers have found that male tits that live near streetlights wake up and start to sing on average three minutes earlier than the rest of the gang.

These birds are more likely to be chosen as mates because under normal conditions, early risers are the strongest fully grown birds. When adventurous lady-birds go looking for extramarital affairs in the morning light they are attracted to early risers because they assume they are the macho, macho men of the group.

As a result, any male blue tit–even a young and scrawny fellow–that lives within 50 feet of a streetlight gets about twice as much extramarital action, and has more offspring than male tits that live in other parts of the neighborhood.

Study author Bart Kempenaers told Science News that they don’t know what effect this might have on the population:

From an otherwise unattractive male’s point of view, streetlights must be great. But Kempenaers says he doesn’t have data on the consequences for the blue tit population as a whole if artificial light inspires many females to mate with males that they would normally shun.

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The ninespine stickleback can communicate with fish friends to figure out the best places to eat, but one thing seems to make otherwise social males disregard the group: sex.

Two researchers have found that, as these male fish prepare to breed, they ignore the group and go off alone to explore their environment in the hunt for food. At the same time, egg-bearing female fish do the opposite, sticking more closely to the pack and copying others’ behaviors to find food.

The researchers from the University of St. Andrews published these findings today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society Series B. They suspect that staying with the group helps save the females from predators and conserve their energy, while venturing out alone might help males find other food sources more efficiently. Coauthor Kevin Laland explains:

“While copying others is less risky, it can also be less accurate, compared to collecting firsthand information. The hormonal changes that cause a male to enter his reproductive phase may also be responsible for this transition to more antisocial behaviour.”

Mike Webster of the University of St. Andrews, who coauthored the study with Laland, invoked the clichéd male driver refusing to ask for directions–but with a twist.

“We are all familiar with the stereotype of males refusing to ask for directions–this might apply to fish too, but only when they are preparing to breed.”

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Image: Press Office, University of St Andrews

Researchers say they have uncovered the dance floor moves to make the ladies go wild–at least if you’re a naked, faceless, non-gendered avatar. After recording 19 men, aged 18 to 35, with a 12-camera system as they danced in a laboratory, the researchers projected each man’s individual moves onto a computer model and asked 39 women what they thought.

The Good:

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Don’t be fooled by the men taking solo vacation pictures and eating alone at the Japanese resort town of Atami. These guys may look lonely as they sit and poke at their video game devices, but love is in the air. In a promotion that ended yesterday, Atami teamed up with Konami, the manufacturer of the dating video game LovePlus+, to offer a place for players and their virtual girlfriends to get away.

The game, available on Nintendo’s handheld DS, allows players to win their girlfriend’s virtual heart by completing homework, working out, texting, kissing (using a stylus to touch the girl’s face), and calling (via the system’s built-in microphone). It made headlines last year when one player, SAL9000, decided to marry his virtual girl Nene Anegasaki (see video above, via Boing Boing).

Play the dating game just right and you win a virtual getaway to Atami. The recent promotion allowed players to visit the sites they’d seen in the game in real life, though with a little plus–their girlfriends’ faces plastered on everything from banners to fish cakes.

Atsurou Ohno, managing director of Atami’s Hotel Ohnoya, told the The Wall Street Journal in a video interview that Atami tried to create a real experience for the some 1,500 “couples” who flocked to the town.

“We place two of everything in the rooms, even if there is only one person.”

Some of the guests paid up to $500 for a night in Atami hotel rooms–which, we also note from the WSJ video, had two separate beds.

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Want to attract a good mate and ward off unknown relations? Secrete a smelly substance from that gland on your chest and rub it all over. At least that’s what a mandrill might do: A recent study suggests that the baboon-like primates may use their smelly secretions to distinguish compatible mates from family.

After taking swabs from mandrill sternal glands, researchers genotyped each sample to determine the monkey’s major histocompatibility complex (MHC)–a unique genetic signature related to the animal’s immune system. They also, using a sorting technique called gas chromatography–mass spectrometry, determined each secretion’s chemical makeup, and thus its stink bouquet.

As the study’s leader Leslie Knapp of Cambridge University told the BBC, more “genetically diverse” mandrills, i.e. unrelated, have different MHCs and chemically-speaking different scents:

“[I]t seems that the odour is something that tells us some really important things about the genes of a mandrill.”

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Unfamiliar with duck loving? Here are the basics: Corkscrewed vaginas and long, temporary, lymph-filled penises that uncoil in fractions of a second. Now researchers have found that some males’ members grow longer when they’re fiercely competing for a mate.

The photo we have to illustrate this magnificent mating equipment is so graphic–in a duck kind of way–that we’re putting it below the jump. As Carl Zimmer memorably put it when writing on the kinkiness of duck sex, it may not be “appropriate for ducklings.”

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When it comes to peculiar penises, there’s no shortage in the animal kingdom. Just last month DISCOVER blogger Carl Zimmer documented new research into why many male ducks have such an extravagant spiral-shaped phallus. This week, in a paper (in press) in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the study of goofy genitalia follows fruit flies.

The male fruit fly has a penis that resembles a medieval weapon, dotted with hooks and spines. Are those barbs there to remove rival sperm, or pierce the female’s genital tract to allow sperm a shortcut, or something else? There was one way to find out: lasers.

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As you’ve probably heard, a man’s testicles hang down because sperm are hyper-sensitive to temperature and need to be a little cooler than the inside of the body. But isn’t there more to it than that?

Oh, definitely yes, says research psychologist Jesse Bering, writing for Scientific American. Bering goes on at great length in his analysis of testicular location. Sure, he argues, the temperature part makes sense. But why would natural selection, which so rewards passing on your genes, put a man’s means of passing on those genes in such a terribly exposed place on his body?

Bering’s lengthy account of gonad geography, and the studies trying to explain it, includes some real gems:

One of the more fanciful accounts–and one ultimately discarded by the authors–is that scrotal testicles evolved in the same spirit as peacock feathers. That is to say, given the enormous disadvantage of having your entire genetic potential contained in a thin satchel of unprotected, delicate flesh and swinging several millimeters away from the rest of your body, perhaps scrotal testicles evolved as a sort of ornamental display communicating the genetic quality of the male.

Oh, and this, on how a man’s cremasteric muscle works to keep his sperm at an optimal temperature by contracting and drawing the testicles up on a cold day and relaxing when it’s hot:

[That's] why it’s generally inadvisable for men to wear tight-fitting jeans or especially snug “tighty whities”–under these restrictive conditions the testicles are shoved up against the body and artificially warmed so that the cremasteric muscle cannot do its job properly. Another reason not to wear these things is that it’s no longer 1988.

In all seriousness, there’s nothing Discoblog values more than analysis of the silly… other than over-analysis of the silly.  If you haven’t had your fill of scrotal hypotheses,  check out the rest of Bering’s post.

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Image: iStockphoto

Some sharks have a nasty habit of taking bites out of each other, but in an aquarium in New Zealand one aggressive shark ended up doing its tank-mate a favor when it tore out a piece of the second shark’s belly. Visitors at Kelly Tarlton’s Underwater World watched in shock as four baby sharks popped out of the gaping wound. The visitors ran to notify the aquarium staff, who quickly removed the babies.

Via the New Zealand Herald:

[Aquarium staff member Fiona] Davies said the unusual delivery had probably saved the baby sharks’ lives.

Staff did not know the mother was pregnant and, had she given birth naturally, most likely at night, the babies would have been eaten by adult sharks and stingrays before staff could rescue them.

When the mom was removed from the communal tank to get her wound stitched up, vets found four more babies inside her. All are reportedly doing well, despite the spontaneous C-section.

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Image: flickr / snickclunk

“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