Showing results for "Sex" in Animals

What does it mean to be female? Mother, carer, the weaker sex? Think again. In the last few decades a revolution has been brewing in zoology and evolutionary biology. Lucy Cooke introduces us to a riotous cast of animals, and the scientists studying them, that are redefining the female of the species. Meet the female lemurs of Madagascar, our ancient primate cousins that dominate the males of their species physically and politically. Or female albatross couples, hooking up together to raise their chicks in Hawaii.

In all animals, mating is a deal. But few creatures behave as if sex is a simple transaction. Many treat it with reverence, suspicion, angst and violence. In the case of the Black Grouse, the bird at the center of Matt Ridley’s investigation, the males dance and sing for hours a day, for several exhausting months, in an exhausting and sometimes deadly ritual called a ‘lek’. To prepare for the ordeal, they grow, preen and display fancy, twisted, bold-colored feathers.

Written in a brilliantly engaging style by biologist Jules Howard, this fascinating and highly engaging work covers the how and why of sex on Earth, in all its diversity. From sperm wars to cuckoldry, hermaphrodites and virgin births, spent males, racy harems, clitoral births, hips, breasts and birdsong, penis-percussion, and those riskiest and most elusive of all traits, monogamy and true love, all this and more is discussed in Sex on Earth, as Jules takes us on a voyage of discovery of the ins and outs of animal reproduction.

A brilliantly engaging guide to the reproductive habits of creatures great and small. Narrated by the author, Dr. Carin Bondar. In The Nature of Sex, 'biologist with a twist' Carin Bondar presents the fascinating diversity of the reproductive habits of the animal kingdom and, through approachable explanations and humorous examples, succeeds in making an eternally popular subject into a book of international appeal.

Humans are the only mammals to walk on two, rather than four, legs. From an evolutionary perspective, this is an illogical development, as it slows us down. But here we are, suggesting there must have been something tremendous to gain from bipedalism. First Steps takes our ordinary, everyday walking experience and reveals how unusual and extraordinary it truly is. The seven-million-year-long journey through the origins of upright walking shows how it was in fact a gateway to many of the other attributes that make us human.

The story of evolution as you’ve never heard it before. What’s the easiest way to tell species apart? Check their genitals. Researching private parts was long considered taboo, but scientists are now beginning to understand that the wild diversity of sex organs across species can tell us a lot about evolution. Menno Schilthuizen invites listeners to join him as he uncovers the ways the shapes and functions of genitalia have been molded by complex Darwinian struggles.

While we joke that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, our gender differences can't compare to those of other animals. For instance: the male garden spider spontaneously dies after mating with a female more than fifty times his size. Female cichlids must guard their eggs and larvae--even from the hungry appetites of their own partners. And male blanket octopuses employ a copulatory arm longer than their own bodies to mate with females that outweigh them by four orders of magnitude. Why do these gender gulfs exist?

Just as humans procreate, animals have their own way of getting it on, too! Some ways are quite unexpected, from the cannibalistic mating practices of the praying mantis to the complicated sex life for snails with backwards organs.

Vorsicht! Dieses Buch ist für Jugendliche unter 16 Jahren nicht geeignet. Es enthält explizite Darstellungen sexueller Handlungen und einschlägiges Vokabular. An 77 Beispielen, die von der Grünen Bonellia über den Grasfrosch und das Seepferdchen bis zum nordafrikanischen Dickschwanzskorpion und zur argentinischen Schwarzkopfruderente reichen, verrät der Biologe Tobias Niemann faszinierende Tricks und spektakuläre Stellungen zur Neukombination der Gene. Das Bonellia-Weibchen ist tausendmal größer als das Männchen.