‘Singing penis’ sets noise record for water insect

A tiny water boatman is the loudest animal on Earth relative to its body size, a study has revealed.

Scientists from France and Scotland recorded the aquatic animal “singing” at up to 99.2 decibels, the equivalent of listening to a loud orchestra play while sitting in the front row.

The insect makes the sound by rubbing its penis against its abdomen in a process known as “stridulation”.

Researchers say the song is a courtship display performed to attract a mate.

Release of Mosquitoes With Suicide Genes Attempt To Eradicate Dengue Fever

Two months ago, in a remote province of Eastern Malaysia, genetically engineered mosquitoes were released into the wild in a two week experiment aiming to see if wild mosquitoes that infect humans with Dengue Fever might eventually be suppressed or eradicated. The 6000 mutant mosquitoes were the biotechnological brainchildren of Luke Alphey, chief scientific officer of the British biotech company, Oxitec. He has pioneered a technique to inject a suicide gene into a wild insect population in a single generation, causing the pest population to dramatically decline in a bug-ocalypse of dead pupae…….

Oxitec’s RIDL technology works by almost the same method that the dinosaurs of Jurassic park were controlled. The term RIDL comes from “Release of Insects carrying a Dominant Lethal”. The idea is to create mosquitoes that have two copies of a dominant suicide gene that causes them to die at a specific life stage unless they get a special chemical. You raise thousands, millions, or billions of mutant male mosquitoes in a mutant mosquito factory, getting them past the suicide stage by giving them the special chemical. In Jurassic park, the dinosaurs were deficient in lysine which had to be a regular part of their dino-chow, while Oxitec’s mosquitoes need the antibiotic tetracycline to turn off their suicide genes.

Then, hypothetically, you release the mutant male factory mosquitoes to mate with the female wild mosquitoes so the next generation of children have one copy of the dominant suicide gene but no access to the special chemical. Hopefully the mosquito population crashes, hopefully Dengue fever stops spreading, and hopefully tropical environments become a bit less dangerous to humans. If it works for Dengue, then it might work for other mosquito born illnesses such as malaria, which infects about 225 million people per year, killing over 700 thousand of them.

And then there’s the cane toad: Not only will they regularly have sex with dead bodies, but they’ll even make sweet love to corpses outside of their species. Not just different types of frog, mind you, but animals that in no way could ever be mistaken as a former cane toad: Snakes, lizards, small mammals — the cane toad is a firm believer in the “hole is a hole” attitude, and an even firmer believer in the “if there’s no hole, just make one with your boner” attitude.

and of course the honey badger is #1 on the list, with this awesome video:

Fish fossils dating to 380 million years ago provide the first physical evidence for intimate sex by copulation.

• Armored shark-like extinct fishes were probably the first animals to have had intimate sex by copulation.
• The world’s first jaws likely evolved to facilitate mating, and not feeding, as had been previously thought.
• Genes responsible for making our limbs, and the pelvic fins of fishes, probably also played a role in developing the first sexual organs.

click on the picture for the gallery

Male fish in Mexico sports sexy ‘moustache’