Sex advice to all creation

From time to time all creatures great and small worry about their bizarre sex lives. Thankfully, Dr Tatiana – with her prodigious knowledge of both natural history and evolutionary biology – has dedicated her life to answering their weird and wonderful concerns.

Dr Tatiana: the series
Dr Tatiana is presenter of the world’s first science musical, describing the evolution of sex and exploring the colourful sex lives of a menagerie of creatures. We meet penis-fencing marine flatworms, and a beetle who has sex with her son and then eats him – and all set to music.

There’s the ethereal, anciently asexual bdelloid rotifer who hasn’t had sex for millions of generations; the mite who copulates with all his sisters while he’s still in his mother’s womb; and the hermaphrodite slug that sometimes emasculates itself by eating its own penis.

Dr Tatiana demonstrates that you don’t need sex to reproduce (the rotifer is not alone: lots of creatures clone themselves) and that often sex doesn’t look like much fun (the male green spoon worm is 200,000 times smaller than the female – who says size doesn’t matter?).

The first programme explains why sex evolved and why we don’t like mating with our close relatives.

The second in the series looks at the evolutionary logic (insofar as there is any) behind female behaviour. Why are females so often promiscuous? Why do the females of so many species demand presents in payment for sex? Is there a link between sex and shopping? And why do females go for various kinds of male – rich, sexy or butch?

The last in the series turns to what animal sex tells us about the male psyche (the answer is: quite a lot). Dr Tatiana also meets man-eating females (the fairer sex of the more than 80 species that are known to eat their unfortunate mates), and looks at the extraordinary evolution of the penis.

Dr Tatiana: the book
Revealing when necrophilia is acceptable, the best time to have a sex change, how to have a virgin birth, when to eat your lover and who should commit bestiality with whom, Dr Tatiana’s agony aunt anthology is filled with the funny, quirky and informative answers that she provides in response to the anxious questions of her correspondents.

Here is a taster of her knowledgeable and invaluable advice:

Dear Dr Tatiana
I’m a queen bee, and I’m worried. All my lovers leave their genitals inside me and then drop dead. Is this normal?
Perplexed in Cloverhill

For your lovers, this is the way the world ends – with a bang, not a whimper. When a male honeybee reaches his climax, he explodes, his genitals ripped from his body with a loud snap. I can see why you find this unnerving. Why does this happen? Alas, Your Majesty, your lovers explode on purpose. By leaving their genitals inside you, they block you up. In doing so, each male hopes you will not be able to mate with another. In other words, his mutilated member is intended as the honeybee version of a chastity belt.

See also Wild sex: honeybee

Dear Dr Tatiana
I’ve heard it’s going to take me three weeks to make just one sperm. Apparently this is because it’s going to need a tail 20 times longer than my whole body. This seems awfully unfair: I’m just a little fruit fly, Drosophila bifurca. Can’t I get a prosthesis?
Waiting For Sperm in Ohio

There’s no market in artificial sperm tails: you’re going to have to make them yourself. You’re right – it’s not fair. Why should a fruit fly 3mm long – smaller than this dash – have to make sperm that measure 58mm? A human is far bigger than you, but gets away with a sperm one thousand times smaller. Indeed, if a man were to make sperm on your scale, it would be as long as a blue whale. Now, that I’d like to see.

See also Wild sex: fruit fly

Dear Dr Tatiana
I’m a spotted hyena, a girl. The trouble is, I’ve got a large phallus. I can’t help feeling that this is unladylike. What’s wrong with me? Can anything be done?
Don’t Wanna Be Butch in Botswana

No one expects hyenas to be ladylike … A single spotted hyena can run down and kill an adult male wildebeest, an animal more than three times its weight … She can devour a Thomson’s gazelle fawn in under two minutes … So you see, yours is not a tea-drinking, cake-eating, genteel society; ladies would be distinctly out of place. Hyena society is aggressive, and it’s easy to imagine that aggressive females do better than shrinking violets. Moreover, the foetal hyena is exposed to high levels of testosterone and other androgens – the ‘masculine’ hormones – while in the womb. Until we know more about how the structure develops, I’m afraid the reason for your … phallus will remain a mystery. But your situation does illustrate a more general point. That is, beyond the basic fact that males make sperm and females make eggs, there are no rules.

See also Wild sex: spotted hyena


Letter extracts taken from Dr Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation: The definitive guide to the evolutionary biology of sex by Olivia Judson (Vintage, 2003).

Top