Free Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation by Olivia Judson Page A

plant cells, stabbing each cell
with their mouthparts and drinking it dry. Although they are mites, they have the ability to make silk just like their spider cousins. In this species, males hunt for adolescent females—those about to undergo their final molt and become adults—and stand guard, so that they can be first come, first served. A guarding male sits on the female, with his legs draped over her body. If a second male arrives and refuses to leave when threatened, some sort of fight will break out. The two males will wave their front legs and grapple with each other, often trying to trip their opponent by attaching strands of silk to his legs. Fights can end in death, but that’s rare. Usually, the smaller male retreats before it comes to that.
    Size is crucial in hand-to-hand fighting. In animals from boa constrictors to humans, the larger combatant typically enjoys a large advantage, so smaller males usually back off. As a rule, savage fighting breaks out only when both contestants figure they can win—that is, when they are about the same size. Consequently, many animals have evolved bizarre rituals to assess their opponents. Remember those flies with eyes perched on the ends of long, stiff stalks? Males measure their strength by going head-to-head to compare eye spans. If there isn’t a clear difference, they’ll fight; otherwise, the male with the smaller eyespan leaves. Thus, you can tell when fighting is important in determining who gets to mate: males will typically have evolved to be big. Male elephants, for example, have evolved to grow throughout their lives rather than stopping after puberty like most mammals. Whereas most mammals cannot grow beyond puberty because their bones fuse together, a male elephant’s bones don’t fuse until he is middle-aged. That’s how male elephants can grow to be more than twice the size of females.
    Among elephants, though, it’s not only size that matters. Bull elephants, even the largest and oldest of them, feel like fighting
only at certain times of the year, when they are in the grip of a fury known as musth. For young males, a bout of musth lasts only a few days at a time, but for the oldest bulls it can continue for as long as four months. When a bull is in musth, the amount of testosterone in his blood soars to levels fifty times higher than usual. Unsurprisingly, this has profound effects on a fellow’s behavior.
    Males in musth display all the symptoms you complain of, and more. They wave their ears and shake their heads and constantly dribble strong-smelling urine—this is what causes the penis to develop the unfortunate greenish tinge you mentioned. Musth even affects their conversation. Most elephant conversations take place in the infrasound, well below the range of human ears but audible to other elephants for miles around. Male elephants are usually the strong, silent type—probably because, unlike the females, they haven’t got large vocabularies. (In fact, it’s not just that male elephants have smaller vocabularies but that male and female elephants have vocabularies that are almost entirely mutually exclusive. Elephant girls and boys couldn’t discuss the same subjects even if they wanted to. I know the feeling.) But an elephant in musth rumbles constantly, announcing his desperate lust and aggressive anger to any elephant in earshot. Males in musth are also much more likely to pick fights with one another than with other males, and if the males are the same size, fights are more likely to escalate. That’s bad news. A big fight can last for hours in the heat of the African sun and can certainly be fatal. In between rounds, fighting elephants uproot trees and throw logs, and if, at the end of all this, both contestants are still standing, the fight finishes with the winner chasing the loser for several miles. This is probably why large males in musth often try to avoid one another—and