Male baboons just sex toys
Girls rule.
That’s what wildlife biologist Chadden Hunter, one of the featured researchers in the two-part PBS Nature documentary What Females Want and Males Will Do, found after living for three years in the Simien mountains of northern Ethiopia with a troop of gelada baboons.
He found that the female baboons establish what, when, where, why and how, where sex is concerned. Girls rule — literally, as it turned out: He watched as one group of four females chased a male off a cliff, after irreconcilable differences reached a crisis point.
“The males, even though they’re twice the size, are just sex toys,” Hunter said, with a straight face.
What Females Want and Males Will Do premieres tonight on PBS. Anyone interested in baboon social psychology — and that of other animals as well — will find their interests piqued.
Male gelada baboons, Hunter says, have “amazing hairdos” and spend much of their day, “poncing around, showing off like peacocks.”
But when push comes to shove, it’s the women who end up on top, while the older males just sit around, “do some housework, and look after the kids.”
Hunter’s baboon study is just one aspect of What Females Want. The program also focuses on the work of Yale University behavioural ecologist and duck researcher Patricia Brennan, who, in the words of Nature executive-producer Fred Kaufman, “has made groundbreaking discoveries in her research of duck phalluses and how they’ve co-evolved with female ducks’ reproductive anatomy.”
The program also profiles the work of University of California-Davis field biologist Gail Patricelli, a self-admitted “pornothologist” who uses remote-controlled robots — “grouse fembots” — to study the signals birds send to each other during courtship.
The idea was to show the many different ways sexual attraction manifests itself in the animal kingdom.
“When you get some of the most amazing behaviour from these animals is when they’re trying to attract a mate,” Hunter explained. “This one chance you get to impress and one chance to get it off with the opposite sex really is a fascinating part of biology.”
Sex talk aside, parents needn’t worry about What Females Want being inappropriate viewing, Nature’s Kaufman insists.
Comments
Leave a Reply
