It turns out that there’s a lot more to the birds and bees than pretty wings and cute mating dances. There’s also stabbing, exploding…and a little murder.
CUPID’S SLIMY ARROWS
All land snails are hermaphrodites—they have both male and female sexual organs, all of which are located on their necks. Before they mate, they engage in a courting period that lasts from a few minutes to several hours, during which the snails touch their “feet” together, caress each other’s appendages, and even “kiss” each other’s lips. Then the snails engage in copulation, when each transfers sperm to the other. (The sperm is stored in special sacs and used later.) After the courtship phase and just before the moment of sexual engagement, some snail species attempt to violently pierce each other’s sex organs with what scientists call “love darts”—thin barbs of calcium, about a quarter-inch in length, that are produced near the sex organs. This piercing can continue for several rounds of mating, during which new calcium darts continuously form. A 2006 study determined what the love darts are for: Snails that are successfully speared by the darts are able to store twice as much sperm as snails that aren’t. It turns out that nearly all of the sperm received during mating is digested and killed by enzymes before it can be used for fertilization. The study found that love darts carry a chemical that impedes production of the enzymes, allowing more sperm to make it to the storage sacs. So snail couples that are more successful at piercing each other have a better chance of producing young.
SKYROCKETS IN FLIGHT
In the world of honeybees, male bees, known as drones, have one main purpose: sex. When they’re only a few weeks old, drones leave their hives and gather in “drone congregation areas,” or DCAs, with drones from several other bee colonies. DCA’s hover 30 to 150 feet in the air and sometimes span 100 yards or more, with the drones hanging out like randy teenage boys waiting for girls to come by. The girls—virgin queen bees who have been sheltered in the hive and fed a diet of royal jelly—leave the hive on “mating flights” when they’re just one to two weeks old. Instinctively, they fly into DCAs, and the young drones give chase. Between 10 and 30 will mate with a single queen in flight, a spectacle that has rarely been witnessed. During the midair mating, the genitals of a drone rupture—biologists describe them as “exploding”—which throws the drone off the queen, leaving his sex organs inside her. Then he dies. The queen flies off to establish a new colony, where she will use the sperm from her explosive mates for the rest of her life (up to three years). Drones that aren’t able to find a virgin queen to mate with go back to their hive, where they are so useless that they have to be fed by female workers. When autumn comes, they’re kicked out and eventually starve to death.
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Extra: Want to know how to tell if a bee is a drone? Look at the eyes: A drone’s are huge—twice as large as those of a worker or queen. Bee experts say drones need the enhanced vision to find the queen during in-flight mating.
LOVE POTION
Male giraffes spend a lot of their time roaming around their home ranges searching for females who are ready to mate. When a female’s in the mood, she rubs her neck on the male’s neck and flanks. The next move is the male’s: He walks behind her and nudges her butt with his nose. This induces her to urinate and, in an activity that’s been witnessed for centuries but never fully understood, the male takes a big mouthful of the urine. A 2006 study finally confirmed why the males do it: A male giraffe can tell by the hormone content in the female’s urine exactly where she is in her reproductive cycle. And he’ll try to mate with her only if she’s in her peak “fertile window,” which occurs every two weeks and lasts just two days. If she isn’t in that window, it isn’t worth the considerable energy it takes to attempt to mate with her. If she is, the male will follow her around, often for many hours, necking with her and generally bothering her until, if she deems him a suitable mate, she finally stops walking. This indicates to the male that he can mate with her. Once he’s mounted, the rest is over in less than a minute.
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BOYGIRL
If you’re ever in Africa or Asia and you come across a hyena with a large penis, you’ll probably think it’s a male. But there’s a good chance you’d be wrong. While still nursing, all hyena pups receive a large dose of the male hormone androgen via their mothers’ milk. This makes the pups more aggressive, a helpful trait in the hardscrabble life of a hyena pack. But it also has side effects for the females: The hormone produces a pseudopenis, a growth that’s several inches long. The difficult part comes when it’s time for mating: A male has to be able to insert his own actual penis into the female’s pseudopenis—a tricky business—and only the most persistent and patient males are able to do it. Even more bizarre: The hyena birth canal is located in the pseudopenis, meaning that the females also give birth to their babies through it.
THAT’S NO LUMP
The anglerfish lives deep in the world’s oceans and is known for having a long growth that protrudes from the top of its head and ends with a fleshy blob. The blob acts as bait that anglerfish use to “angle” for their food—other fish. But for many years, scientists couldn’t solve a mystery: why the only anglerfish that were ever caught were females. Then someone noticed strange, fleshy growths on the females’ bodies. Further study finally determined what the lumps were: male anglerfish, which are much smaller than females (in some species, 
of their size), and are born without a functioning digestive system. Upon hatching, the first thing a male does is hunt down a female and bite into her side, back, or belly. Enzymes released from the male’s mouth dissolve the female’s flesh, and he eventually fuses onto her. Their bloodstreams merge, and for the rest of his life, the male lives off of the female like a parasite. Over time, his organs, teeth, bones, and eyes all disappear. All that remains are his testes. When the female is ready to mate, she releases eggs, and what remains of the male releases sperm to fertilize them. Bonus: A large female will often play host to several males, and will live the rest of her life with their manly lumps on her body.