Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation Read Online Free PDF Page B

partners—but if her first lover is sufficiently stimulating, he is more likely to be the father of her children. And among crested tits—small songbirds—females constantly beg for sex. A male who can’t keep up with his partner’s appetites will find himself cuckolded. For lions, though, the picture is ambiguous. Lions are harder to observe than hamsters or rats or crested tits, so information on lioness promiscuity is anecdotal. By some accounts, a lioness in heat will go off alone with her partner for a few days; according to others, lionesses change mates once a day. True, genetic analysis shows that it’s rare for cubs in a litter not to have the same father, but that may not tell us much. If lionesses are like rats (excuse the comparison), the cubs’ paternity may not reflect the mother’s virtue so much as the outstanding performance of one or another of her mates.
    How to resolve the matter? Since an experiment is obviously out of the question, we could compare lions with other cat species: because all cats are related, similar behaviors may have similar underlying causes. Unfortunately, the comparison deepens the mystery: although some species of cat copulate as much
as lions do, they have no other obvious traits in common. For example, sex mania cannot be explained by the fact that lions live in groups. Solitary cats such as leopards and tigers also copulate like lunatics while the female is in heat. Nor is it a Big Cat Thing. Although large cats like pumas, leopards, tigers, and jaguars copulate like lions, cheetahs and snow leopards do not. Moreover, the tiny sand cat—a little-known species that preys on rodents in the deserts of the Middle East and Central Asia—copulates wildly. Other small cats, such as the bobcat and the tree ocelot, do not. And frustratingly little is known about the tendency of females in these various species to be promiscuous. For now, I’d say that female promiscuity is the best hypothesis to explain lioness behavior, but an honest jury would have to say the case is simply not proven.
    I’d like to leave you with one final thought. Giant water bugs are type II sex maniacs, the male hogging the female to make sure no other man gets his hook in. The reason is that giant water bugs are devoted dads, carrying eggs about on their backs and then helping the young water bugs to hatch. Female giant water bugs don’t like to mate with males already encumbered with a brood, so most males only get a chance to mate with one female at a time. They make the most of it. One male I heard of insisted on copulating more than a hundred times in thirty-six hours—or almost once per egg. Surely you’re not going to be outdone by a water bug?

    Dear Dr. Tatiana,
    Â 
    I think I must be deformed. I’m a long-tailed dance fly and I go to all the right parties, but night after night I’m spurned. The guys won’t come near me, let alone try to seduce me with a fancy
dinner. I’ve noticed that all the other girls look like flying saucers, but I look like a regular fly. Is there anything I can do?
    Â 
    Quasimoda in Delaware

    Your case is curious. In long-tailed dance-fly culture, it’s traditional to mix food and sex. An hour before sunset, the male captures a suitable insect—a juicy mayfly, perhaps—and then goes to find a female, taking his quarry with him so she can eat it while they make love. Females congregate and wait for males to arrive. Unlike many insects, however, long-tailed dance flies don’t rendezvous at hills or tree stumps. They meet at clearings in the forest, where the females’ bodies show up in silhouette against the sky.
    Male long-tailed dance flies are fussy and prefer to give the insect they’ve caught to the largest females. We don’t know precisely why. In a cousin of yours, males desire large females because they are closer to laying eggs, which means there is less risk that the