2008-09-04

When three become one


I'm monogamous to the extreme, and have never understood why some people likes to wrestle around with several mates at the same time. I suppose I'm what many of my colleagues in the world of evolutionary biology would refer to as a "choosy female". I want one mate and when I find him (which I already have, but that's another theme) all my focus and energy will be on him. Of course, this is not a view that I share with many organisms. The animal kingdom is filled with mating behaviour that, if these manners would ever occur in humans, would make all our religious leaders and puritanists have multiple heart attacks.

For example, male toads mount the female from behind and then fertilizes her eggs externally. This is called amplexus. Since there are many males that have aburning desire to produce some offspring, a single female can be mounted by several males at once (called "multiple amplexus") and different eggs can be fertilized by different males (and the female may actually drown due to the heavy load but I suppose the males are to aroused to care). Multiple amplexus is presumably the reason behind the now-and-then reports of frogs with three heads. It's not one frog with three heads; its three frogs strongly indulging in corpulation so that it looks like one being. True love, perhaps...

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