Bonobo males get sex with help from their mums

Posted By Joe on September 2, 2010

Most human men would be appalled at the idea of their mothers helping them to get laid. But then again, we’re hardly as sexually carefree as bonobos. While these apes live in female-led societies, the males also have a strict pecking order. For those at the bottom, mum’s assistance may be the only thing that allows them to father the next generation.

Martin Surbeck from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology found that bonobo mothers will help to usher their sons into the best spots for meeting females, and they’ll sometimes help their sons in conflicts with other males. Thanks to their help, their sons get more shots at sex than they would otherwise. Meanwhile, the dominant male is frequently denied by these supportive mothers, who help to curtail the sexual privileges afforded by his rank.

This type of maternal support is possible in bonobo societies because males tend to stay with the group they were born into. Even after they become adults, they still stay in frequent contact with their mothers. Surbeck found that a mother will only help their own sons; unrelated males get no aid. In helping her own young, who share half of her DNA, a bonobo mother can ensure that her own genes have the best chance of being inherited by another generation. In helping her sons, she indirectly guarantees her own success.

Surbeck spent twelve months observing a group of more than 30 wild bonobos at Salonga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He showed that the males formed a clear hierarchy and the dominant individuals got the most sex. This may seem obvious but bonobo societies are often portrayed as egalitarian affairs. The ties between rank and sex aren’t clear in captive animals, and previous studies have disputed whether this link exists in the wild. Surbeck’s data clearly show that it does.

For males in the middle and bottom rungs of the social ladder, the odds of a successful sexual encounter went up when mum was around. In groups with no mothers, the alpha male accounted for 40% of all the sex; if mothers were present, the big guy was only involved in 25% of matings.

Surbeck found no evidence that bonobo males engage in rape or that females resist mating attempts. Instead, the male get’s the lion’s share of sex by physically monopolising females and by directly competing with other males for mating privileges. It’s possible that mothers help their sons by getting directly involved in fights. Indeed, they sometimes tried to interfere with the sexual encounters of unrelated males, while blocking any attempts to meddle with their sons’ sex lives. But these interventions were relatively rare and Purbeck thinks that they’re relatively unimportant.
Instead, Surbeck thinks that mothers are probably using their status to usher their sons into the right spot within the group, allowing them to interact more closely with females. They’re more matchmakers than bodyguards.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/08/31/bonobo-males-get-sex-with-help-from-their-mums/

After one mating, when the male loses its hectocotylus, it won’t be able to copulate again till the next season, when a new hectocotylus grows.

Posted By Joe on August 31, 2010

Unusual Complex Sex in Octopus Species
Off Sulawesi
By Stefan Anitei, Science Editor

Octopuses may be the brains of the sea, but not the sea lovers. They really give a new perspective to the phrase “the male is just a tab of the penis.” A new study made at the University of California, Berkeley, and published in the journal “Marine Biology,” shows that at least one species of octopus inhabiting the shallow reef waters off northern Sulawesi Island (Indonesia) has a complex and passionate sexual behavior.

The species Abdopus aculeatus is a diurnal small octopus, with a spiky tan body the size of an apple and 8-to-10-in (20-25 cm) long arms.
“This is not a unique species of octopus, which suggests others behave this way,” said co-author Roy Caldwell, a professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley.

The Abdopus males appeared to be choosy and when they selected a specific sex partner, they jealously guarded her den for several days, chasing away rivals and even engaging in strangling them when they ignored the warnings. Males appeared to prefer large females.

“If you’re going to spend time guarding a female, you want to go for the biggest female you can find because she’s going to produce more eggs. Most of what we know about octopuses comes from laboratory observations of just a few species,” said Caldwell.

Flirting or fighting males signaled their gender through striped body patterns (octopuses have mimic ability overcoming that of a chameleon; one individual has 1-2 million chromatophores in its skin, starred pigment cells colored in yellow, orange, red, brown or black, and activated through nerves).

The team also detected small “sneaker” males attempting to mate with females while hiding their male identity, by mimicking female type of swimming and not showing the masculine brown stripes.

The shyness of the octopuses makes them hard to investigate in the lab, especially their mating rituals.

“They’re obsessively secretive, solitary and pretty spooky. If you watch them, they watch you back,” said Caldwell.

“We quickly realized that Abdopus aculeatus broke all the ‘rules’ – doing the near opposite of every hypothesis we’d formed based on aquarium studies,” said lead author Christine Huffard, a Berkeley graduate and postdoctoral fellow at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, California, who investigated the population of northern Sulawesi Abdopus aculeatus for her Ph.D. fieldwork.

In other octopus species

There are 289 species of octopuses, ranging from the giant octopus in the Northern Pacific (Octopus dofleini), which has on average 3 m (10 ft) in length and weighs 15 kg (33.3 pounds) (but the record was of 10 m (30 ft) in length and 272 kg (604 pounds)) to the male argonaut octopuses that are 2 cm (0.8 inch) long.

Octopuses live only 1-3 years in the case of females and up to 5 years in the case of males. They mate (at least females) just once for several times when they reach sexual maturity.

The penis of the octopus is called hectocotylus and it is formed of the third tentacle on the right of the male, which is modified in various ways to effect the fertilization of the female’s eggs. It stores spermatophores (packages of sperm cells). After one mating, when the male loses its hectocotylus, it won’t be able to copulate again till the next season, when a new hectocotylus grows.

In common type octopuses, males die within few months after mating, without regenerating another hectocotylus. The shape and size of the hectocotylus varies greatly among octopus species, being used for species identification.

Usually, the internal side is almost devoid of cups and irregularly creased. In many species, it is considerably elaborated. Sometimes, the hectocotylus can even lose its tentacle form, and the males of those species have the appearance of having only seven tentacles.

Mating can last for two hours and the male introduces the hectocotylus into the gills’ cavity where it deposes the spermatophores (pouches filled with millions of sperm cells), but the partners keep the distance. They recognize each other through smell and touch. During the mating, the male loses its hectocotylus, but till the next season, he will regenerate a new one.

In Argonauta octopuses, the male does not even approach the female. When the spermatophores are formed, the hectocotylus breaks off from the male while away from the female, heading towards her and entering alone into its mantle cavity. The funnel-mantle locking apparatus on the hectocotylus keeps it lodged inside the cavity.

The female octopuses lay strings of eggs (comprising 100-500,000 eggs) attached to the roof of an underwater dwelling or cave. She fasts until the eggs hatch (24 to 125 days later), guarding them and oxygenating them via blown water jets. Then, she dies.
“Most of what we know about octopuses comes from laboratory observations of just a few species,” said Caldwell.

“This is the first study to show a level of sophistication not previously known in the sexual behavior of an octopus,” added Caldwell.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Unusual-Complex-Sex-in-Octoppus-Species-82280.shtml

Penis Puppets

Posted By Joe on August 28, 2010

Penises are used in these pictures, so if an actual penis is ofensive to you, please don’t view these penis puppets.

http://listoftheday.blogspot.com/2009/01/penis-puppets-of-day-nsfw.html

Evolution and the penis

Posted By Joe on August 25, 2010

I read once about an old aboriginal custom of matching women to men on the basis of penile and vaginal compatibility. Small, “deer” men were matched with deer women and the large, “buffalo” men were matched with buffalo women. How they came to determine just who was a “deer” woman and who was a “buffalo” woman was never disclosed and I can imagine a few “deer” women would have been somewhat dismayed at their designation. On the face of it I suppose this seems reasonable. Why have deer boy with buffalo girl when buffalo boy is the only man for the job? But it begins to break down when one remembers that the vagina is highly expandable. With a modicum of foreplay, deer woman can easily take on buffalo boy and may well prefer the experience. Those sensible communal minded natives no doubt came to this arrangement when they realized that deer boy would never make it in the open market. This was clearly a deer boy driven agenda.
This raises an interesting question. If the ideal size is larger than average, why isn’t the average man larger? I suppose one could dismiss the question by answering “God likes to mess with our heads,” but there is a genuine conundrum here. Our bodies have been sculpted over millennia by evolution to perfectly match form to function. And of all the forces driving evolution, none is sharper than female sexual selection. If women prefer to have sex with men with large dicks then the genes for large penises should quickly spread through the population. Every man should be packing a whopper. So why aren’t they? Well, there are several theories.

1. Woman really don’t like ‘em big. This, of course, is a total lie. When was the last time you saw a five inch dildo?

2. Women may like a large penis but they’re stuck with guy they get. Someone’s got to end up with deer boy, right? Well, yes, but deer woman can also screw buffalo man on the side and con deer man into raising buffalo son. Think this doesn’t happen? Wrong! It’s been estimated that 15 percent of children in Britain are the offspring of someone other than their stated father. Studies have shown that women are more inclined to cheat at the peak of their ovulation. Even if the rate of cuckoldry were only 5 percent, buffalo man genes would dominate the population within 12 generations (in evolutionary terms, a blink of an eye).

3. Every man is already packing a whopper. This is actually true and lends some credence to the idea that there is selective pressure favoring larger penis size. After all, our closest relatives, the bonobo chimps, have penises that are substantially smaller than ours at 3 inches (and they’re proud of them too). Gorillas at 1.5 inches would be the laughing stock of the shower room if they couldn’t beat you to a pulp for even looking. Compared to most mammals, even deer boy is hung like a stallion. Evolutionary biologists have theorized that our relatively large penis size has evolved as part of ongoing selective pressures. Plausible enough. But again, we’re talking sexual selection here, something vastly more powerful than adaptive selection. If the ideal penis size is eight inches, the top of the bell curve should be eight inches. The fact that it’s not tells us that something else must be happening.

4. There may be selective pressure favoring bigger dicks but there are also selective pressures mitigating their size. Aha! This must be it. There is a limit to even runaway adaptation – a cost to every extra ounce of flesh we carry on our bones. It has to be fed and oxygenated. Limited resources tend to keep a lid on such extravagances. There’s also a physical limit to what women could realistically accommodate. And a limit to what men can have hanging. Buffalo man with his big floppy dick may be the subject of every woman’s fantasy but sadly, buffalo man didn’t make it when the hunting party was forced to flee through the brambles (ouch). So okay, twelve inch dicks are probably out. But what about an eight inch dick? Okay… brambles again, but why not a big dick that collapses to a nub when not aroused? And how about thickness? In any size survey, women invariably choose girth over length. Why isn’t the penis thicker?

5. The genes for dick size are passed down through the mother. Deer woman may sleep with buffalo man but give birth to… sigh… deer boy. Proponents of this theory (this is a bar table theory only. No serious scientist would advance it) speculate that the genes for penis size, like the gene for hemophilia, are located on the X chromosome. Because a woman has two X chromosomes and a man only one, a woman may mate with buffalo man but his buffalo dick genes will lose out in the long run. But anyone who knows anything about Mendelian genetics will recall that that while none of buffalo man’s sons will have his buffalo dick genes, half of his daughters will. And so will half of their sons. All things being equal, as long as women prefer buffalo dicks, buffalo dick genes should propagate.

6. Dick size isn’t genetic at all. It’s determined by hormones in utero. We are all, by default, female. What turns a relatively tiny clitoris into a strapping great dick are androgens – male hormones, generated at a critical point in gestation. In fact there are women who are genetically male but phylogenically female because of a mutation that renders them androgen insensitive. There are also studies that suggest homosexuality in rats can be induced by exposing the mothers to stress at a critical point in gestation. Which is all fine and dandy, but the problem with applying this to dick size is that while the mother’s hormones have an influence on gestational development, masculinization is turned on by the fetus itself, through a complex interplay of its own genes. While it’s possible that because your mother was late for work at a critical juncture, you now have a piddly dick, dick size in the larger population is still genetically determined.
So where does this leave us? None of these theories by themselves can explain why we’re not all walking around with whoppers in our pants. But perhaps the final result involves an interplay of all the factors. Women may prefer big dicks, but their choice of mate is more varied and complex. As one woman said to me, it’s not what’s inside you, it who’s inside you. This would go for the men they choose to have affairs with as well. In other words, dick size is a factor, but it’s not the factor. Other adaptive pressures come into play and before you know it you’ve got a bunch of deer boys running around. Either that or maybe God really is just messing with our heads.

http://www.altpenis.com/penis_news/evolution_penis.shtml

Mating game’s biggest cheaters

Posted By Joe on August 24, 2010

The mating game can be brutal, and competing males cheat, sneak, steal, and use other dirty tricks to get the female. Here we present seven species that ignore sportsmanship and play the game in the most unscrupulous way possible.

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 eat you–all while watching out for other dudes who want to exploit your hard work.
The male Australian redback spider, member of the black widow family, is much smaller than the female, so he warms her up by dancing on the web and plucking the threads and sending her good vibrations. A typical female demands 100 minutes of dancing; any less and she will gobble up the little guy. But dance too long and a backstabbing male will sneak up and mate with the female after she has been satisfied, without having to do any dancing of his own.

Fish in Drag
Not all males are created equal in the animal world. Some bluehead wrasse aren’t quite up to snuff, but instead of giving up on the dating game, they use their undersized bodies to sabotage the mating of larger males.
Called sneaky primary males, these small fish have the same coloring and size as females. This allows them to cozy up to the real females and slip them their sperm packets. All while the dominant males haven’t a clue.

Duel of the Penises
Flatworms don’t just backstab figuratively, they literally stab each other.
Each flatworm has both male and female sex organs, so a mating pair throws down to decide who will give and who will receive. The first to pierce the other’s skin with its penis is the male of pair. The loser of the penis duel gets a consolation prize of sperm and the honor of birthing the offspring.

When Love Is Like Oil
Male monarch butterflies have a unique sexual adaptation: Their penises double as dipsticks to detect how much sperm has already been deposited in a female.
If her tank is running on empty, the male will inject a diluted sperm mixture to fill her up and trick other males into thinking she’s full of active sperm. However, if a male determines that she’s carrying watered down sperm, he can inject his own more potent mix in an attempt to overpower the sperm already present.

Strolling Through the Love Garden
Who could resist an intricate silken trail leading to a love garden? This is exactly how male red velvet mites attract females, except in their case the love garden is full of sperm that has been deposited on small twigs and stalks.
The female looks for these silky trails, and follows them to the gardens. If she likes what she sees, she sits in the sperm. However, if another male happens upon the sperm garden of a competitor, he’ll destroy it and plant his own seeds.

Bachelor Pad Hijinks
For most guys trying to get a date, living in a bachelor pad isn’t exactly a selling point. For bowerbirds however, their bachelor pads–or bowers–are the selling point.
They build elaborate beds where they hope some magic will happen, and then they strut about in front of them while trying to seduce a mate. But they better pay close attention to their rumpus rooms. Younger males, who don’t have as much home-decorating game as the older bowerbirds, will sneak in to other bowers and steal decorative items, like blue feathers, shells, bright berries, and colorful bits of plastic.

Orgasm Ambush
There’s no such thing as an unfair fight to monkeys called stump-tailed macaques. If a smaller male has been picked on in the past, he’ll attack the bully when he is most vulnerable–which is to say, mid-orgasm.
The attack doesn’t prevent reproduction, since the mating male will already have ejaculated. Rather, researchers point to only one explanation for the ambush: revenge.

http://discovermagazine.com/photos/the-mating-game.s-biggest-cheaters

http://discovermagazine.com/photos/the-mating-game.s-biggest-cheaters

Weird things men do

Posted By Joe on August 22, 2010

Video of hair removal – I could hardly believe someone would willingly do this to their Willy.

http://www.jokeroo.com/videos/funny/redneck-hair-removal.html

Why Monogamous Birds Cooperate, Why Finches Cheat

Posted By Joe on August 21, 2010

Bird Sex Round-up:

Bird cheaters beware: They’re watching you. Two recently published studies, one in Science and one in Nature, have asked what bird benefits come from remaining faithful–or cheating on the down-low.
Don’t Cheat

Analyzing the breeding habits of 267 bird species, two researchers have found that it may pay for some birds to stay true to their partners.
Cooperative breeders–birds that help raise each others’ young–appear to be more monogamous. Researchers looked at the number of broods with a half brother or sister, the products of a mother bird’s free-loving ways. Cooperative birds’ cheating rate averaged around 12 percent, while noncooperative birds around 23 percent. Also, the most promiscuous cooperative birds appeared to receive less help from other birds in the nest.

These findings support the theories of evolutionary biologist Jacobus Boomsma (who wasn’t involved in this study), who has tried to explain the puzzle of cooperative behavior that doesn’t directly benefit the helpful individual. Boomsma believes that social animals cooperate to raise their relatives’ offspring as a roundabout way to pass on the family genes, but argues that monogomy is a necessary condition for this to work.

[With monogamous pairings] all siblings are equally related to each other and to each parent. Promiscuity, on the other hand, leads to many half-siblings and lowers the relatedness of individuals in a group.

Cheat
Though female Gouldian finches might not like to kiss and tell, they do like to kiss. And by kiss, we mean mate with multiple males and then pick the best of their sperm. The birds come in a variety of head colors and their best chance of having healthy offspring comes from mating with birds of the same colored head. Lead author Sarah Pryke told

“What this study has shown is that, if you do cheat on your male, if you are able to do it in such a way that they don’t find out then the benefit can be absolutely huge for the female.”

Though scientists aren’t sure how the birds pick from their multiple mates’ sperm, which can stay in the female’s reproductive tract for 12 to 13 days, they note that even if they cheat with a bird of the same head color only once, it can father up to 75 percent of the brood. Coauthor Simon Griffith said:
‘The female is apparently able to select out genetically good sperm from bad sperm,” Dr Griffith said. ”It’s like a lottery where you rig the lottery.” [The Sydney Morning Herald]
Still, even if two matching bird heads make a pair, that won’t save the male from a cheating female. Though the females may ultimately use the sperm from the more compatible mate, the researchers found that they won’t forgo the offer to cheat regardless of head color.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/08/20/bird-sex-round-up-why-monogamous-birds-cooperate-why-finches-cheat/

Posted By Joe on August 20, 2010

In 1672, the anatomist Regnier de Graaf declared, ‘the names of this organ … are almost too many to count, and more are invented every day by after-dinner speakers and by men with time on their hands and a penchant for venery as well as by lascivious poets.’ Things have not changed much since the seventeenth century; a recent survey of American college students pinpointed 144 alternative names for the penis among men and 50 among women. The word ‘penis’ is probably derived from the verb pendere, meaning ‘to hang’, but hundreds of euphemisms have arisen for reasons of propriety and comedy. The most traditional English-language synonyms include yard, phallus, and manhood.

The penis is undoubtedly the centre of much linguistic, artistic, scientific, and erotic atten-tion because of its association with procreation, sexual pleasure, and prowess. An anatomically complicated and versatile organ, the penis, as De Graaf noted, ‘consists of diverse parts which nevertheless all skilfully cooperate in making it able to stretch and relax.’ This changeable nature is key: ‘It would be unseemly and disgusting and it would totally impede one’s conduct of worldly affairs to be like the Satyrs and have a penis always erect. On the other hand to have one always loose and floppy would incommode successful conduct of the affairs of Venus.’ Much medical attention has been paid to the latter problem, namely impotence. Partly via research into impotency, we now know that erection derives from a complex system involving multiple psychological and physiological factors. The proximate cause of erection is an increase of blood supply to the spongy tissues of the penis.

Decorative codpieces and mythological tales have long encased the ‘male organ’. Perhaps the best known penis-centred tale is that of Osiris, the unlucky Egyptian god who had his body chopped into parts and scattered about. Isis, Osiris’s wife and sister, managed to locate all except the penis. Ever since, stories have abounded of penises which seem to enjoy virtually independent existences and wills.

Phallic worship has often centred around disembodied penises. Some native Peruvian peoples, for example, worship and seek strength from the ‘phallus tree’, the branches of which look like penises. Phallic worship generally speaks to issues of fertility (agricultural and human) and power. Thus, while testicles have been represented as the loci of maleness, the penis has also traditionally and cross-culturally signified virility and power. (What else but an attribution of power to the penis could explain the continuing fascination with the posthumously disembodied and preserved penis of Napolean Bonaparte? Having passed through at least nine sets of hands since Bonaparte’s death, the emperor’s penis now allegedly belongs to an American urologist.)

While the power of a penis — real or representative — has frequently been judged by the penis’ size, Aristotle assumed that too large a member would actually render a man relatively infertile: ‘Those who have a very big penis are less fertile than those with an average-sized one, because cold semen is sterile and what has to travel any great distance gets cold.’ By contrast, today we find in Western popular culture a virtual obsession with penis size because of the equation of penile mass with prowess. In the US, a fast-rising number of men are seeking ‘penile augmentation’ surgeries designed to make their penises look longer or be wider. These procedures, which include tissue grafts and injections of fat, are not widely tested or approved and come with serious risks. Some men instead follow the ‘low-tech’ techniques of the sadhus, Indian ascetics who stretch their penises through the use of hanging weights.

Ornamentation of the penis is common in many cultures and involves lengthening, piercing, dressing, and tattooing. These cosmetic alterations often carry spiritual significance. At one time, the practice of circumcision (removal of the foreskin) was confined mostly to Jewish males, but early in this century, Western physicians became convinced that a circumcized penis is a healthier penis. (Infections may occur less often in circumcized penises, and penile cancer, although in any case very rare, is virtually unknown in circumcized penises.) The rate of circumcisions consequently soared. Lately, the number of male circumcisions done for ‘medical’ reasons has tapered off, as the foreskin’s perceived value has again risen.

In spite of folk tales that a man’s penis size can be guessed by the size of his nose or feet, penis size does not correlate with these other measurements, nor is post-puberty penis size easily predictable from pre-puberty size. Size may be considered critical, and boys born with a condition known as micropenis are sometimes raised as girls — but definitions of micropenis vary. With respect to general appearance, boys may be born with hypospadias, in which the urethral opening is on the underside of the penis rather than on the very tip of the ‘head’ or ‘glans’, but this is not often severe enough to require correction. So, while relatively strict criteria of penile normality may be held in Western popular culture, in fact penile anatomy varies considerably. Minor variations are common and do not require surgical attention.

The present-day criteria for penile ‘normality’ arose in part from the conviction among male psychoanalysts that the penis is critical in the development of male and female identities. Thus, while Sigmund Freud attributed a necessary ‘penis envy’ to women, his successor Jacques Lacan posited a multidimensional ‘phallus’. Lacan’s ‘phallus’ refers to representations of the penis; the phallus becomes a ‘privileged signifier’ taking precedence over all others. Pre-modern anatomists often likened the male penis to the female vagina, but it is in fact homologous to the clitoris.
— Alice Dreger
http://www.answers.com/topic/penis-4

What would your penis do-video

Posted By Joe on August 18, 2010

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXmPFJqTHKo

Why Obama Should Take on Prison Reform

Posted By Joe on August 17, 2010

(Aug. 17) — In an article recently on AOL News, Paul Wachter posed the question: Will Obama take on prison reform? That’s a great question. It would be hard to predict what Obama actually will do, but this is certain: President Barack Obama absolutely should take on prison reform. It is a moral and practical necessity.

The problems with today’s prisons are well documented. Conditions are deplorable. Here are a few facts:

• Federal prisons are being operated at 160 percent capacity. Mandatory minimum sentences are putting thousands of nonviolent offenders in prison, for disproportionately long terms.

• Approximately two-thirds of prisoners released each year will be back behind bars in some form before three years have passed.

• Mental health care is woefully inadequate.

• Prison rape is a moral outrage rampant across America. More than 60,500 inmates reported sexual abuse in 2007 (the actual number of rapes is likely far higher), and nearly 1 out of every 8 juveniles in custody became a victim of sexual assault from 2008 to 2009, according to a Department of Justice study.

• Most states still allow the shackling of women during labor and delivery, often causing permanent scars. This unnecessary and humiliating procedure is opposed by the American Medical Association, the Rebecca Project for Human Rights and virtually anyone else who knows about it.

In short, the system is not working.

But improving prison conditions faces two big challenges: tight budgets and the unpopularity of compassion for those in prison.

Last year, for example, the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission issued a set of rape prevention standards for adoption by the Justice Department. But corrections officials claim the new measures are too expensive, even though some of the basic policies (like not allowing male guards to supervise females in the shower) would be almost costless. Though the one-year deadline for implementation has already passed, Attorney General Eric Holder still hasn’t taken action.

http://www.aolnews.com/surge-desk/article/will-president-barack-obama-take-on-prison-reform/19577278?icid=sphere_aolnews