Today I read about peculiar courtship rituals in the animal kingdom and since it is spring I would like to share some of them with you. Maybe we can all learn something from it, refine our human interaction, arrange unions, liberate from hormonal controls and physiological cycles and enjoy the splendors of polygyny, polyandry and monogamy!
First of all, the bower bird, living in Australia and New Guinea. The male bower bird tries to entice the female into a straw hut decorated with all sorts of items, preferrably matching the blue of his feathering.Appart from traditional decoratory items, such as shells or berries, the modern bower bird likes clothespins, plastic caps and all sorts of strips and shreds of consumer culture. If an object is moved while Mr Bird is out at a collector's fair, he puts it back in its place. Miss Bower walks around, carefully assessing each bower, considering everything from the color coordination to the rarity of the items, including the overall artistic significance and what that might say about Bob Bower. Finally, many females mate with the same male, leaving everybody else in artistic squalor and tornment.
Secondly, the grebe. The average grebe surely knows how to make the good times roll. These water animals engage in a complex water ballet during courtship, stylishly dancing with hydrofoil feet accross the water while exchanging gifts of seaweed. How utterly beautiful, nice and sexy! I think I wanna be a grebe for a sunny springtime afternoon!Much unlike the dancing fly. During mating time, the male dancing fly secretes a little ball of silk which he gives to the female while he copulates ("Dear, I think the ceeling needs painting"). It may sound nice to bring a gift to a date, but why exactly does he do that? Apparently, in other related species occupied with less precopulatory fuss, the female may decide to eat the male, rather than making precious love. Some male flies have therefore cunningly taken up bringing a small prey animal to their date, to have something up their sleeve if Ms Fly is looking for a fry. She eats, he copulates, everybody wins.
Now that isn't the summit of fly cunning: Other guys decided to wrap the prey in a little bit of silk, in order to make sure Lady McFly is occupied with unwrapping and eating, while he's got a little more time to copulate.
The dancing fly, in turn, is the abomination of that idea - he simply sticks to the wrapping and when poor Florina Flyson is finished unwrapping the ever smaller present ("What could it be?! A grub? A fly? A small fly? A tiny fly? A very, very tiny diamond? Nothing?!!! What the ---") - he is already gone, bragging about his conquest with the other guys at the liquor store. I surely do not want to be a lady dancing fly, not even on a sunny springtime afternoon on Broadway.
Now, not all guys are like that. For that matter, let's turn to one of my favorite animals - the sea horse. When Seamour Stallion and Melanie Mare discover their mutual interest, they court for several days, disregarding any interference of others. They change color (do they blush?) and swim side by side, gently holding tails or gripping the same strand of sea grass. Before dawn they wheel around dancing. Their final courtship dance lasts about eight hours whereas Seamor pumps water through his egg pouch, which opens up to display its emptiness. Then both he and Melanie let go of any anchors and drift snout-to-snout in spirals upwards out of the seagras.Melanie deposits her eggs in Seamour's pouch, together with a handmade wooly hat and other practical items one needs for a long journey. He then sighs, assures her that everything will be fine, fertilizes the eggs and carries them with him until birth - a pregnant father, as well as a beautiful and indubitably humorous animal: They can look with each eye at different locations at the same time. I wonder if they use that skill during courtship.
