Bringing up a fruit bat’s oral sex habits with a colleague you don’t know very well may not be the best idea–but according to an Irish court, it doesn’t quite merit the extreme sanctions associated with more flagrant sexual harassment.

Back in May, Discoblog brought you news that a biology professor in Ireland was being charged with harassment by a female colleague after he read from and discussed a racy new paper about fruit bat fellatio. The biologist, Dale Evans, was ordered to attend two years of counseling to correct his attitudes and behavior, and was told that he would be monitored for those two years. But Evans claimed that he’d simply thought the paper was hilarious, had shown it to numerous people that day, and had zero intention of causing offense to his colleague, Rossana Salerno Kennedy. Now ScienceInsider gives us the update:

Evans challenged the ruling, and a judge has now ruled in favor of him, which means that he won’t have to do the counseling. The university’s sanctions on him were “grossly disproportionate,” the judge said. “I won my battle,” Evans tells ScienceInsider.

The High Court judge said that Evans should have received a verbal warning rather than the counseling and monitoring. Evans wasn’t vindicated completely, though. As the Irish Times reports:

The judge refused to grant orders overturning findings of an external investigation that, while Dr Evans had no intention to offend in showing the paper to his colleague, the incident fell within the definition of sexual harassment under UCC’s “Duty of Respect and Right to Dignity” policy.

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Not Exactly Rocket Science: Holy Fellatio, Batman! Fruit Bats Use Oral Sex to Prolong Actual Sex

By Mara Grunbaum

To find a mate, most animals must travel—up a tree, down a stream, across the street to the bar. But not barnacles, which spend their entire adult lives cemented firmly to rocks, boats, whales and the like. To compensate for their immobility, barnacles have evolved the longest penises relative to body size in the animal kingdom.

The appendages can reach up to ten times the length of the barnacles’ bodies to allow them to search of a partner. See a video—safe for work!—below.

According to new research published in Marine Biology, the shape of barnacles’ penises varies depending on their circumstances. Barnacles spaced far apart from each other develop stretchier organs, the better for reaching across the gaps, and barnacles exposed to rough waves grow wider ones to stand up against the tide.

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A cricket’s constant chirping may seem a bit ballsy, but just wait until you hear about their testicles. For at least one species of cricket, the tuberous bushcricket (Platycleis affinis), the testicles take up 14 percent of the insect’s body mass!

The Daily Mail made a stunning observation:

To put this into perspective, a man with the same proportions would have to carry testicles weighing as much as five bags of sugar each.

The discovery, made by a team led by Karim Vahed, was published in Biology Letters today. Vahed said in a press release that he was surprised by the finding:

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Scientists are starting to unravel the sex secrets of the black truffle, that rare and expensive delicacy, in hopes of making its cultivation easier.

It turns out the fungus has two different sex-like states, and both must be present to reproduce. One truffle can only be one of the sexes, and while that may not sound odd to us humans, it’s very out of place in the fungus world. Fungi are usually able to reproduce asexually and self-fertilize, lead author of the paper Francesco Paolocci told The Telegraph:

“It was long assumed that the truffle was like other fungi, but we know now that it needs the help of a partner. It has members of two different sexualities, a bit like male and female.”

Still, that doesn’t sound too complicated, right? Well, what’s hard is getting close enough to your partner to “score” when you are stuck in single-sex colonies on oak trees that are yards away from each other (which bears a striking resemblance to my undergrad experience). The researchers were the first to find that truffles tend to grow in single sex bunches, Paolocci explained to The Telegraph:

“But we found that individual trees are only colonised by a single sex of the fungi. Even when we started with a mixed colony, it quickly became dominated by one sex or the other. To produce the truffles, you have to have the two different sexual strains meeting in some way, but they can be quite far away from each other.”

It is likely that in nature this meeting is accomplished via animals that dig in the dirt and transfer spores from one colony to the other. This could help explain why it is so difficult to cultivate the ridiculously expensive foodie-magnet; when trees are impregnated with the fungus, only about 30 percent of the colonies survive.

The truffles themselves are actually the fruiting body produced by the “female” sex, which is the sex that lives on the tree roots. The “male” truffle fungus is found in the soil, Paolocci told The Telegraph:

“In order to have a productive truffle ground we need to have both the male and female strains. We have genetic markers that help us identify the male and female strains, and this can be used to increase production. It could help bring the price of these fungus down.”

Related content:
Discoblog: To Satisfy Lust for Truffles, The French Will Try to Clone Them
80beats: How a Fungus Makes a Jet Stream to Carry Spores Abroad
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Who needs sex? – Rotifers import genes from fungi, bacteria and plants
The Loom: Respect For the Fungus Overlords
DISCOVER: The Biology of…Truffles

Image: Flickr/ Kjunstorm

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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Worried your man is cheating? Don’t rely on hunches, send his undies to the lab. Some suspicious people are paying upwards of $500 to air their dirty laundry, and a DNA-testing company is happily testing suspected spouses’ condoms, sheets, and tighty whities for genetic signs of infidelity.

Chromosomal Laboratories Inc., the same company that has offered paternal-testing giveaways on Father’s Day, is now in the unmentionables business. The company offers a smorgasbord of tests starting with a UV-light sweep and going as far as a microscopic search for sperm heads.

On the version of the company’s website designed for suspicious men, the biological sleuths describe a test for Prostate Specific Antigen and boast: “The technique is extremely powerful because it can confirm the presence of semen even in samples from sterile or vasectomized men.”

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There’s that old saying about the futility of a bird and a fish falling in love. Apparently, two birds might not fair any better: Unlucky ducks from two different species are falling for the wrong women.

Actually, matchmaker Michael D. Sorenson of Boston University set them up at birth. In a foreign exchange program of sorts, his team took sixteen young male redheads (Aythya Americana) and sixteen young male canvasbacks (Aythya valisineria) and switched their homes, allowing canvasbacks to raise redhead ducklings and vice versa.

Sorenson wanted to study imprinting—when a young bird sees its caretaker and recognizes her as its mother. Determining what Mom looks like turns out to be important later in a bird’s life, as the duck uses its mother’s image to pick out mates.

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According 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

Chalk up another mark of chimpanzee intelligence–they not only use tools for gathering food, but also to improve their sex lives.

The chimps don’t have to duck into a sex shop to gather their erotic implements—the tools they use literally grow on trees. Researchers have documented chimps in a Tanzanian colony using brittle leaves in their mating rituals.

In a botanical bit of foreplay, the male chimps grab dry leaves and break them apart with their hands or mouths, creating a distinctive raspy sound that signals their sexual readiness. Think of it as the chimp equivalent of putting “Let’s Get It On” on the stereo.

As researcher William McGrew explains (slightly graphically) to The New York Times:

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Here’s what we know about the social networking site, Facebook. It can mysteriously suck away large portions of your day, and make you sneaky, nosy, and narcissistic. It can also, in some extreme cases, cause carpal tunnel syndrome from clicking through the bazillion vacation pictures you posted online. But does Facebook cause syphilis? The short answer is “no.” The longer one is “Are you nuts?”

But that didn’t stop British tabloid The Sun from cranking up its imagination and posting an article titled “Sex diseases soaring due to Facebook romps.”

The piece was based on a British National Health Service (NHS) report that noted that syphilis cases in the Teesside region, an area of northeast England, were up four fold. It said casual sex in the area had spiked and as a result of people not using condoms, a surprising number of women had contracted syphilis. So, from fewer than ten cases in 2008, the number had now gone up to 30.

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