Hello, sailor crab!
In an act of ultimate woo-pitching, your male luv-uh seduces you on the beach, on a hot summer night, under a full moon… pinch me, I’m dreaming? No, but you are about to get pinched in all the wrong places by a horseshoe crab.
That’s just one of the nifty, species-specific mating rituals outlined in this food-for-thought post over on Wired’s science blog. Collectively, they sound an awful lot like, well, dudes.
“Some of these rituals are designed to convey reproductive fitness. Others are meant to trick reluctant mates into a one-night stand. And — hermaphrodites withstanding — it’s nearly always the males who try to catch the attention of ladies,” says the piece.
The animals listed engage in acts of attraction that sound either dizzyingly romantic (oh, to find an elephant of one’s own!), oddly gender-flippy (it’s the male grouse that shakes his caboose to catch the gal’s eye) or eerily reminiscent of the worst Saturday-night meat market ever (skull-butting, peen jousting).
Or would you rather be a fish?