Relationships: Animal instincts

Think your dating life stinks? Consider the plight of this single male desperately seeking advice:

"The joy is gone from life. I feel angry all the time," he wrote to Dr. Tatiana, a sex columnist with a penchant for odd ducks. "And I'm obsessed with sex. Night after night, I have erotic dreams. Am I ill?"

Probably not, she responded. More likely, the poor fellow suffers from SINBAD -- Single-Income, No Babe, Absolutely Desperate -- a syndrome unlikely to ease up for, oh, 20 years at least. Such are the breaks when you're 27, male -- and an African elephant. And such are the challenges for Dr. T., actually respected evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson, who answers "letters" from all manner of critters in her "Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation."

As bizarre as human mating rituals might seem, we pale in comparison to the rest of the natural world. Necrophilia! Exploding torsos! Genitals that make music! It's hard to know whether to cover one's ears or take copious notes.

Judson is rooting for the latter. She's the keynote speaker Sunday at Evolution 2008, an international gathering of scientists continuing through June 24 in Minneapolis. The conference is sponsored by the University of Minnesota's Bell Museum of Natural History, its College of Biological Sciences and Minnesota Citizens for Science Education.

Judson, speaking by phone from her home in London, said she'll "talk about sex, obviously, and approaches to the public understanding of science." But mostly sex.

Judson had no intention of becoming an "agony aunt," as she calls it, for seaweed flies or burying beetles. Born in the United Kingdom, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area at 10, then to Baltimore, with her historian father.

The anxiety and uncontrollable aggression experienced by that African elephant, for example, is normal for a bloke his age, Judson explains. Female elephants prefer older males. Patience is essential.

Things get wackier from there. Consider the male honeybee. After the little fellow completes the sex act, he explodes, his genitals ripped from his body with a loud snap. Necessary? Absolutely. By leaving his genitals inside the female, Judson explains, he blocks her up, making it far less likely she'll be able to mate with another male.

Female chimps, it turns out, are sex maniacs (as many as eight trysts in 15 minutes). But there's a reason for this, too. By mating with many males, Judson said, she can "create confusion over the paternity of the baby. ... If a male thinks a child may be his, he will refrain from killing it. Natural selection, it seems, often smiles on strumpets. Sorry, boys."

And banana slug penises are gigantic and complex, but you already knew that.

Pondering life's possibilities

Judson hopes, though, that audiences will look beyond the eye-popping sexual antics to a deeper appreciation of the world we inhabit.

"By looking at nature, we can learn a lot about the possibilities of life," Judson said. "We are of nature. We find much of nature to be very beautiful. We have dogs, feed birds, plant gardens. The sexuality of animals and plants is one of the main driving forces of nature."

And learning from other animals' behavior can make our lives more meaningful, she said. It's not about understanding what we should try to be like, but why certain things are difficult.

Some people, and most animals, it turns out, genuinely find monogamy more difficult than others, she said. "Some people enjoy sexual variety more than other people. There are big social costs to not being monogamous, but it does help us understand why some things are difficult. It has made me less anxious. It's bigger than we are."