The Seven Mysteries of Life

by Guy Murchie

  A number of mammals have stiffeners inside their male organs, ranging from the mink's cartilage to actual bone in the wolf and fox (as Aristotle first recorded), and which have served humanity as natural tools, from the walrus's formidable rod, traditionally used to club seals, to the raccoon's dainty prong with a slight hook at the end that an eighteenth-century dandy would carry on his watch chain for a toothpick mounted in gold, and that backwoods tailors still claim is just the thing for yanking out basting threads. Although aging humans may occasionally have fancied they themselves could do with something of the sort, it has proved anything but a boon to the few abnormal men actually born with a bone in the penis. Nor have any of the very rare semi-monsters with double penises or double vaginas ever managed such an extravaganza as the theoretically possible double-barreled marriage (opossum style) or derived any other noticeable benefit from their superfluities, which evidently can no more impart double ecstasy than can a millipede outrun a centipede.

  Maybe if you are male with an imagination sufficiently lubricious you would prefer to descend into the microcosm and be a roving tom rotifer, one of those curious little pond beings (page 88) who are smaller and rarer than their bustling females and appear to have quite a merry sex life, the chief feature of which is that their relatively enormous phalluses can be poked into any part of any female rotifer, which should make rape (if there were such in the microcosm) as easy as tag. This sort of "hypodermic insemination" is also used by leeches and some arthropods, but often requires a certain amount of hustling about. So if you like to loll perhaps you'd rather be a Schistosoma haematobium.

  That's a kind of microscopic fluke who lives in human blood and gives people "snail fever" in the wet tropics. The threadlike female grows up already encased within the burlier male. And in certain other microbe species their sizes are reversed; she is bigger and, in effect, has him securely zipped inside her nightie. Such affairs illustrate what is known as "perpetual copulation," requiring no mate hunting nor even maneuvering into position, and I guess the ultimate example is a kind of double hermaphroditic animal appropriately called 'Diplozoon paradoxum', who lives in the gills of carp and matures in pairs that soon grow together into Siamese twins permanently riveted in two places: where the phallus of each penetrates the vagina of the other in an un-untiable double splice.

  As for the mating problems of larger animals, some seem quite baffling - though obviously animals who haven't become extinct must have solved them somehow. How can a porcupine, let's say, cope with the 25,000 quills that defend his bride, each with its dozens of barbs and their tendency to expand when moistened by flesh, which would be deadly against his exposed belly and genitals? The fact is: he succeeds by playing it cool from the start, cautiously grunting and sniffing her over, then, fully aroused, rearing up on his hind legs and tail to waddle forward expectantly. If she also rears up, he will likely begin spraying her with urine, which seems to be accepted by the porcupine maiden as a kind of personal bouquet, and, if it keeps up, soon gives her all the thrills of a bridal shower with the ultimate disarming effect of inducing her skin muscles to pull her quills down flat like grounded spears so he can safely mount her from the rear.

  One might suppose there must be a section under Galileo's Principle of Similitude or Froude's Law of the correspondence of speeds expressing the relation between the tempo of love and body bulk, the larger beasts presumably taking more time at it than the smaller, but the pace of intercourse turns out to be geared more closely to complex factors of mechanical and chemical physiology than to overall size. Among birds, the swiftest of known animals, the ostrich and the duck are relatively slow in coition because they have intromissive organs, while most other birds can mate in a flick by merely touching their cloacas together, frequently (as you've probably noticed) in flight. Elephants may seem clumsy, but they not only are highly sophisticated in courtship, with large repertoires of provocative gestures, proddings, nippings and subtle erotic teasings with the trunk, but sometimes they complete actual copulation within 18 seconds. Whales 20 times bigger than elephants also have elaborate courtships featuring wild leapings and very tender full-length fondlings with flipper and fluke, and have been known to finish their coition in less than five seconds, despite the prodigiosity of a phallus up to ten feet long and a foot thick. Cattle too are quick on the draw, bulls sometimes winding up the job in two seconds, while an Indian antelope (the nilgai) appears champion of mammals, finishing in "a fraction of a second" (according to Heini Hediger of the Basel Zoo). Yet stallions with their longer organs take minutes, lions and tigers usually a quarter hour, pigs and bears most of an hour and minks, martens and sables commonly over an hour. Slower still (without considering the "perpetual copulators") are many small creatures like snails or earthworms who often take several hours and aquatic ones from diving beetles to sea turtles who have been known to cling together for days.

  Some of these may be slowed down by the cold like the remarkable Alaskan stone fly, who has been seen to mate rather stiffly yet successfully in a temperature of 32°F., with its body hardly a degree warmer. Some are deterred by the heat like elk, who often have to ascend to windy heights between times to cool their testicles back to potency. Some are delayed by inexperience - the chimpanzee, for instance - because, unlike mice and simpler creatures who make love by instinct, he must learn how. Some are almost indifferent to sex like the male gorilla, who waits until a female makes a floozyish pass at him before giving her so much as a glance. Some suffer from roughness like the rhinoceros, who can't seem to get a real bang out of his inamorata until she literally bashes and gores him bloody and staggering. And female rodents being courted are often vicious to the point of being murderous. In fact wood rats get killed about as often by shrewish females as by rival males, usually during the long sparring period of preliminary coition that is required to make her ovulate.

  Which brings up the interesting general rule that, in species where the female is eager or at least cooperative, the penis is rather short, but in species where she is shy, reluctant or violent, it is proportionately much longer, with of course a correspondingly deep vagina in the female - measures that appear to be nature's quaintly persuasive way of keeping her from changing her mind once she has succumbed. Other male tools for restraining females range all the way from the stag beetle's huge mandibles and the frog's love thumbs to the duckbill platypus's spur that not only firmly grips the female but, some think, injects a sedative to soothe her. And the aforementioned male diving beetles have curious suction disks on their forelegs for getting their long-lasting vacuum hold on the slippery bride, while a few kinds of flies (Dolichopodidae) have cuplike blinders that neatly fit over their loved one's large and rather starry eyes during mating which may well help to keep her attention on what she is doing.

  The position of mating makes a difference too of course and varies widely, most mammals using the familiar rear approach of dogs and cats, a few (ranging from millipedes to beavers to whales) mating belly to belly (often vertically in water) and surprisingly some (like the rabbit) back to back because the male organ aims rearward. This rear-to-rear position, however, is commonest among insects, notably bedbugs and flies (including butterflies and mosquitoes), where in some cases it is offset by the male's slender abdomen making a U-turn, except that certain unlucky males (notably the horsefly) while mating get flipped over backward by the female's buzzing wings, then dragged ignominiously and upside down through the air behind her. With most birds and insects where the sexes are of nearly equal size, it matters little whether the male mounts the female or the other way around because sex organs of the cloaca type need only be touched together to pass the sperm. Indeed the aggressive females of some species, such as mole crickets and saber grasshoppers, have made themselves quite a reputation for mounting and apparently dominating the male.

  A few animals have even evolved a definite handedness in their mating. I mean the male specializes in either right- or left-handed sex orga
ns that require the female to have a complementary handedness for the meeting to be successful. The most striking example is a family of small fish living in tropical American waters called the Poeciliidae among whom guppies, mosquito fish and the four-eyed anableps are best known. Instead of laying eggs like other fish, these give birth to swimming minnows, but their most unusual feature is the male sex organ, which evidently evolved from a ventral fin and can be half as long as its owner. In erection it enlarges and swings forward until, in some species, its tip is almost even with the fish's nose yet pointing perhaps 300 to the right or left. In several species this fishy phallus has fingerlike appendages that one can imagine must be delightfully handy for feeling its way into the female and it is sometimes also abetted by two sets of comblike retrorse spines (apparently evolved from side fins) for clasping her the while. But she definitely must have her orifice on the correct side, right or left, to receive the male, else the whole match is off.

  PRODIGALITY

  The oyster, when it comes to mating, seems to have a knottier problem than the anableps, because he not only is handed, being permanently attached to a solid surface to the "left" (deep) half of his shell while the "right" (flat) half is a movable lid, but he has no legs, flippers, fins or tail and therefore no chance to go courting or embrace a mate. So what does he do but compensate with prodigality. He alternately pours forth sperms and (shifting sex) eggs in immense numbers to the open sea. Indeed if the estimate of one malacologist (that an oyster can lay a septillion eggs a year) is anywhere near correct and all the issue survived, in less than five generations our world quite literally would be his oyster.

  Another sort of exuberance amounting to a molluscan orgy is practiced by the oyster's near cousin, the sluglike sea hare, a kind of shell-less snail sometimes two feet long that grazes on seaweed and is well named both because of its long earlike tentacles and its promiscuity, which is completely hermaphroditic. Curiously the sea hare's phallus is on the right side of its head and, when playing the male, it puts its head between the finlike fans of a companion playing the female, gradually oozing its member into the genital opening. In spite of the sluggishness of its movements - which we ought to forgive since it is, after all, a kind of slug - it doesn't seem to miss any tricks, for at the same time it is a male to one sea hare it will be female to another on the other side, and as many as fifteen of them have been seen linked thus in a chain. In a few cases such a chain's ends (understandably lonely) had somehow worked their way around to meet and join, forming a continuous loop, with each animal playing a double role in a sort of subsea version of what the French call la ronde - which makes me wonder how any sea hare, once plugged into such a sexual merry-go-round, ever gets out of it!

  The fish in general seem sexually more carefree than any other classes of large animals, not only roaming the ocean with few territorial restraints but (with some exceptions) doing their fertilizing externally and wholesale. The great fish schools are therefore mostly co-ed and the individual boy and girl fish do not bother looking for partners, nor do they date or mate, because both sexes are so densely mingled that many more than enough germ cells are cast together upon the waters to fertilize and hatch all the progeny that can live. In fact one might say the whole school is "going steady" with itself all the time.

  Naturally such prodigality requires an enormous output of sperm and eggs, almost all of which will inevitably get eaten or lost even when they have the luck to meet each other and become fertilized. Yet nature seems to delight in just such production splurges, even in the case of internal fertilization, where it seems hardly necessary, for it is estimated that the human male ejaculates over a hundred million sperms in an average orgasm, the stallion 50 times as much and the boar an unsurpassed 85 billion just for one shot at a jackpot of baby pigs. And if you think one shot is a fair day's output for even a tame farm animal, you should hear the plaint of a sheep farmer who kept a big flock of ewes in a fold by themselves so they couldn't be bred out of season. Somehow one night his lone and lonely ram rammed his way through the bars and made the most of it with the flock. The farmer never could find out how many ewes the rambunctious ram mounted during his maximum of eight hours inside the fold (some ewes no doubt more than once), but five months later, as a result of that one night, 114 of the ewes gave birth to lambs!

  The astronomical multiplicity of sperms does not mean that these cells are individually unreliable or necessarily ephemeral, for it takes only one - virtually any one - to fertilize an ovum, and it may have great powers of endurance before it gets its chance. Bats, for instance, who mate each autumn in midair (quite a trick with their intromissive organs), leave the viable semen stored in the female all winter to fertilize her ova shortly after she wakes from hibernation in spring. And turtle brides, who are adept at the waiting game, have been known to store sperms for more than four years. A lot more diversiform than ova, these male cells come in a wide variety of shapes, as the illustration shows, propelling themselves with everything from lashing tails to the spore ooze of worms.

  VEGETAL SEX

  I don't think there is much need to separate the animal and vegetable kingdoms in their sexual traits, for there is no incontrovertible line between them. Neither do vegetables such as blue-green algae, who are thought to have invented sex long before animals existed on Earth, owe anything to the animals in resourcefulness of lovemaking. Even though plants are less completely divided into males and females, they are just about as varied in shape, in their hermaphroditic and conjugal devices, and I suspect that, at some level of awareness, they may really enjoy their gentle version of conjugation, which of course they have evolved in many cases by ingeniously exploiting (sometimes actually enslaving) the animals.

  As a matter of fact, divining the subtleties of vegetable reproduction has been no easier than divining those of animal reproduction, and even the great Aristotle argued a priori that plants could have no sex. It was the Babylonians who first noticed that date palms were of two kinds, only one of which bore fruit and then only when at least one of the other kind was also present in the area. Later some imaginative Babylonian surmised that the bearing tree must be female, the other male, whereupon progressive date farmers began to help the two get together. It took many centuries for this dating idea to be generally accepted.

  In our own day it has been proven that the wind can pollinate date palms when trees of the two sexes are more than 50 miles apart and it is certain that thousands of different flowers and blossoms, male and female, are specifically shaped and adapted to fertilization by butterflies, moths, bees, beetles, birds, bats, snails and other creatures. One bee or butterfly in fact can attend about 20 flowers a minute, or 20,000 of them in a long summer day, so if there are any bees or butterflies active in a garden, however few, there is little chance of any suitable flower not being fertilized. Meanwhile let me say that, like mollusks and a goodly number of other animals, the many hermaphroditic plants usually separate their sexes by time if not by space in order to avoid fertilizing themselves. Thus while the primrose has a male flower on one stalk and a female on another at the same time, the mallow and sage start off male but at a later time turn female, and the Aristolochia makes the opposite time shift from female to male. Others, such as the buttercup, merely have a chemical barrier against self-fertilization, and others again, like the dandelion, have rejected sex altogether and simply dispense their familiar tufted seeds that require no fertilization. Should the appalling prospect of the abolition of sex strike you as having merit, however, may I point out that, successful though the common dandelion is in our day, it has for some reason sacrificed its future for its present, by denying itself the variability it once had through constantly recurring new combinations of male and female cells (the evolutionary "purpose" of sex) and therefore it has become quite inflexible. Some botanists go so far as to say it is devolving instead of evolving since, unlike sexier flowers, it is likely to get wiped out by a future environmental change it cannot
adapt to.

  If the wind in the willows is a poetic phrase to you, it is assuredly even more so to the willows and many other trees, to most grasses, mushrooms and a good tenth of all flowering plants. A breeze is in truth a link in life itself for, like the exuberant oyster, these graceful creatures have long found it vital to broadcast their spores wholesale to the open ocean of air around them, entrusting their descendants to the invisible rivers of wind which waft them as surely as any watery currents below - and certainly more swiftly. Under the microscope pollen grains appear amazingly varied, often tiny spheres with studs or warts like those of campion, or bristles in the case of mallow, either of which kind is nicely designed to grip the hairs of the messenger bees that carry it. Or it may be still tinier and lighter, like the ovoid pollen of the chestnut tree or the bubble-bearing pollen of pine - just right for floating on air. Wind-borne pollen is understandably smaller than animal-borne pollen because it not only has to be supportable by airy molecules but must be produced by the billions to compensate for the enormous expectable wastage in being strewn at random through the sky. A single ragweed plant has been measured to generate 1600 million pollen grains per hour, which, seen over a summer landscape with other such pollen in vast clouds, will produce a faint blue haze of astounding fecundity.