fellatio

Regular readers of this blog know that while I think studying animal cognition, behavior, and communication is (sometimes) fun and (always) interesting, the real importance - the why should I care about this - is because by understanding animals, we can attempt to learn more about ourselves. I've written about this before. Here are the relevant excerpts: When human adults show complex, possibly culture-specific skills, they emerge from a set of psychological (and thus neural) mechanisms which have two properties: (1) they evolved early in the timecourse of evolution and are shared with other…

Oral sex is a rarity in the animal kingdom with just a handful of species (humans, bonobos) who participate in the act. Well, move over high-functioning primates because there's a new, high-fellating mammal on the bj circuit, the short-nosed fruit bat. Yeah, we get it, "short-nosed..." We seriously can't make this stuff up. Random Fact #265: Due to the terms of his Federal plea bargain, Andrew is actually not allowed to watch this video! Apparently, according to the paper recently published in PLoS ONE, about 70% of female short-nosed fruit bats engage in oral sex with their partners.…

Many humans whinge about not getting oral sex often enough, but for most animals, it's completely non-existent. In fact, we know of only animal apart from humans to regularly engage in fellatio - the short-nosed fruit bat (Cynopterus sphinx). The bat's sexual antics have only just been recorded by Min Tan of China's Guangdong Entomological Institute (who are either branching out, or are confused about entomology). Tan captured 60 wild bats from a nearby park, housed them in pairs of the opposite sex and voyeuristically filmed their liaisons using a night-time camera. Twenty of the bats got…