Some Great Animal Mating Rituals

When it comes to courtship, mankind has nothing on the animal kingdom.The evolutionary imperative of finding a suitable mate has produced a staggering array of rituals, from black grouse booty-shaking to mosquito duets and gender-bending octopi camouflage. It’s a rare animal that doesn’t seek romantic attention in a funky way.Some of these rituals are designed to convey reproductive fitness. Others are meant to trick reluctant mates into a one-night stand. And — hermaphrodites withstanding — it’s nearly always the males who try to catch the attention of ladies.
Maybe animals and humans aren’t so different after all.

Black Grouse: Sometimes simple is best: just plain, old-fashioned booty-shaking, with males showing off their bright white posterior feathers and engaging in ritualized battles that look a bit like capoeira.

Abdopus aculeatus: This Indian Ocean octopus doesn’t exactly display what people call courtship. Instead, the males mimic female coloration, allowing them to get close enough to a female to make mating possible. Sometimes, however, as in the video above, the guys just fight.

Hippopotamuses: Hippo ladies don’t exactly go for metrosexuals. To impress them, males use their tails to fling their feces — a highly-efficient way of conveying olfactory cues about reproductive health.

Flatworms: Thankfully for humans, courtship doesn’t involve figuring out which partner is male and female. Not so for the hermaphroditic flatworm, who settle their similarities with penis jousting contests. The winner gets to be the man in the relationship.

Horseshoe crabs: This primitive arthropod doesn’t have any couple-specific rituals — at least, none that biologists can identify. But they make the list because they mate only during the summer, on beaches, under full moons. With that sort of romance, no wonder the species has survived for 350 million years.

Bighorn sheep: Like the Black Grouse, they don’t do anything radical — they just do it well. Males fight to impress the ladies, running into each other head-first at high speed, their horns making a sound that reverberates for miles.

Elephants: In stark contrast to the animal world’s more combative and deceitful mating rituals stands the elephant. Males conduct their courtship over a period of weeks, squirting females with water, bringing them food and generally proving how nice they are.

Mosquito: Most animal mating rituals involve a guy trying to impress a girl. Leave it to the lowly mosquito to rescue equality among the sexes: their song. Though the male’s wings typically produce a sound with a frequency of 600 hertz, and the female’s wings a 400 hertz song, each mating individual will adjust his her or sound so as to meet in the middle. The resulting harmonic convergence is, at 1200 hertz, a bit like love itself: more than the sum of its parts.

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