Bizarre boning: 7 animals with weird-ass sex habits

An unforgettable story in Popular Science last week about the bizarre mechanisms of fruit fly mating (fruit flies have “spiky hairs” on their legs that they use “to clasp onto the female”??), sent Fusion’s resident animal-sex expert Daniela Hernandez and me down a weird animal sex K-hole. This is the strangest animal sex stuff we found:

Spiders with dicks for legs

WIRED does a great job finding weird animal stuff for their weekly “Absurd Creature Of The Week,” and unsurprisingly, these features often involve spotlighting strange animal sex behavior. A recent one from Matt Simon points out that male sea spiders have “genital pores in their legs,” meaning, in other words, their legs are dicks. That’s neat!

Worms with penis-heads that have sex with themselves (also something about penis-fencing???)

From our friends at Discover: “But what if a penis-fencing male can’t find a sparring partner? According to new research just published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, they just inject themselves instead.” Sounds confusing, huh? Watch the video above for more detail.

Bed bugs with dicks like sabers

Bed bugs aren’t known for being nice, so why would their sex be any different? From that PBS video above: “He takes his penis and stabs her in the abdomen, releasing sperm directly into the circulatory system.” Damn, bro.

Aggressive ostriches

The title of this video—”Ostrich sex-at the zoo… Dirty, NSFW *ORIGINAL*”—probably tells you everything you need to know, but the additional description below the video—”Quite self expalnitory! An ending you wont forget…” really puts to bed any doubts you had about watching two huge, absurdly shaped birds do the deed.

My reaction? Pretty much the same as commenter OhBama21: “ok. i watched this cos i was just curious how ostrich have sex.” Me too, my man.

Dark fishing spiders who have sex and then just die

Another weird critter from WIRED is the dark fishing spider, who dies as soon as it ejaculates for the first time. (A morality story to make nuns everywhere happy: don’t have sex, kids. Because after you do, you’ll DIE!)

When male dark fishing spiders copulate, they die — death is the unavoidable consequence of the mechanism by which males transfer sperm to females.

Living life to the fullest : – )

Hippos that shit and piss to attract attention and then are chill af when they do have sex

CNN enlightens us to the mating ritual of hippos:

For a hippo, mating begins with the romantic act of marking your territory by urinating and defecating (at the same time, no less!), then twirling your tail like a propeller to spread the olfactory mess in every direction.

Hippo sex is not as colorful as their mating rituals. As you can see in the video above, the hippo just kind of hangs out for a while. Thrusting? What’s that?! (Human males, you can do better.)

Sloths who play that slow game

Sloths, notorious for their slow-moving ways, evidently approach sex in the same way. And it doesn’t last very long either. Maybe that’s how they got their name?!

Daniela Hernandez is a senior writer at Fusion. She likes science, robots, pugs, and coffee.