OMG, just caught up on over 400 posts and I read every one.

My siblings and I all have Old Testament names, first and middle. If I had been a boy, I might have been named Frodo (and my birthday's only one day off). I think there was also talk of naming me Leah Regina, and my brother was nearly Judah Benjamin.

...that's all I got. Bed time.

Rolling her genitalia out of the water doesn't seem intended to improve access.

Do you think that was for the cameras?

Names... I was named for a song that my mom liked.

Do you think that was for the cameras?

No, I'd say it's one of two things. Either she doesn't want to mate at all, or else she only wants to mate with those males that are fit enough to fight through the other males to reach her. By making it harder to reach her, she improves the efficacy of the test. Either way, she's reacting to a situation in which she's getting mobbed by multiple males at a time, with little prospect of escape.

The Hawaiian monk seal, incidentally, carries this mobbing behaviour to extremes. They're a critically endangered species; there's more than one reason for this, but one threat is a highly uneven sex ratio. Males can outnumber females by up to 3 to 1, and come mating season, males mob females so aggressively that it's fatal to the female. One measure now being pursued to ensure the species' survival is removing the most aggressive males; I've even heard it suggested that to improve their birth rate, they should be given drugs to suppress their libido and make mating a less fraught affair.

Are they born 3 to 1 or do they rape themselves into that proportion?

billytea! Check out Isabella's Green Porno on Bed Bugs

That's quite wonderful. It's been suggested that male bedbugs will even stab other males; their sperm travels to the other males testes, and when that male mates, he will pass on some of the other male's sperm too. However, this claim has been disputed, and if it were a common risk, you'd expect countermeasures to have evolved.

"Don't let the bedbugs rape your testicles" sounds FAR more menacing...

Are they born 3 to 1 or do they rape themselves into that proportion?

That I don't know. I'd be surprised if it were a birth ratio issue, but there could be other differences in lifestyle between males and females that expose them to different mortality rates. However, the sex ratio varies between different breeding colonies, so it could well just be aggressive mating. (There would potentially be a feedback effect; as the sex ratio becomes more skewed, the males become more desperate to mate with any remaining female, and sex becomes more violent as the competition becomes fiercer.)

Here's Isabella's entire Green Porno series - they're all very entertaining.

I saw Rossellini's bed bug video many months ago. I am still too scarred to even try to watch the whale one.

Mama Mia, on the other hand, was entertaining. Partially because it made my husband cringe from start to finish, but he couldn't stop watching it.

Not sure if folks saw this one. Sullivan posted to it on his site, and I can't stop laughing at it: Dot Dot Dot