The natural world is filled with diverse—not to mention quirky and odd—animal behaviors. Consider the male praying mantis that continues to mate after being beheaded; the spiders, insects, and birds that offer gifts of food in return for sex; the male hip-pocket frog that carries his own tadpoles; the baby spiders that dine on their mother; the beetle that craves excrement; or the starfish that sheds an arm or two to escape a predator's grasp. Headless Males Make Great Lovers and Other Unusual Natural Histories celebrates the extraordinary world of animals with essays on curious creatures and their amazing behaviors. In five thematic chapters, Marty Crump—a tropical field biologist well known for her work with the reproductive behavior of amphibians—examines the bizarre conduct of animals as they mate, parent, feed, defend themselves, and communicate. Crump's enthusiasm for the unusual behaviors she describes-from sex change and free love in sponges to aphrodisiac concoctions in bats-is visible on every page, thanks to her skilled storytelling, which makes even sea slugs, dung beetles, ticks, and tapeworms fascinating and appealing. Steeped in biology, Headless Males Make Great Lovers points out that diverse and unrelated animals often share seemingly bizarre behaviors—evidence, Crump argues, that these natural histories, though outwardly weird, are successful ways of living. Illustrated throughout, and filled with vignettes of personal and scientific interest, Headless Males Make Great Lovers will enchant the general reader with its tales of blood-squirting horned lizards and intestine-ejecting sea cucumbers—all in the service of a greater appreciation of the diversity of the natural histories of animals. Marty Crump is an adjunct professor of biology at Utah State and Northern Arizona Universities. She has been a herpetologist for more than fifty years, working with tropical amphibians to study parental care, reproduction, territoriality, cannibalism, and tadpole ecology. She is the author or coauthor of fourteen books, including A Year with Nature and Eye of Newt and Toe of Frog, Adder's Fork and Lizard's Leg , both also published by the University of Chicago Press. Most recently, she is editor of Lost Frogs and Hot Snakes: Herpetologists’ Tales from the Field . Headless Males Make Great Lovers & Other Unusual Natural Histories By Marty Crump University of Chicago Press Copyright © 2007 Marty Crump All right reserved. ISBN: 9780226122021 Chapter One Headless Males Make Great Lovers Praying Mantis From whence arrived the praying mantis? From outer space, or lost Atlantis? I glimpse the grim, green metal mug That masks this pseudo-saintly bug, Orthopterous, also carnivorous, And faintly whisper, Lord deliver us. -Ogden Nash, from Custard and Company Continue having sex after your head has been chewed off? That's what intrigued my fifteen-year-old son. He was writing a report on the sex lives of praying mantids-the first time all semester I'd seen him do any biology homework. Rob knew that mantids are relentless predators. As a kid, he'd seen them lie in wait for prey, with their spiny, grasping front legs upraised and their pincers partially opened, poised for action. He'd watched mantids' heads swivel three hundred degrees as the huge eyes tracked their moving prey. And he'd witnessed unwary grasshoppers and caterpillars get nailed and then consumed. He'd read that female mantids sometimes eat their mates, but until freshman biology class he hadn't known that headless males make great lovers. Imagine the following scenario: a male mantid, attracted by the smell of a female hidden in a lilac bush, creeps up behind her and when close enough leaps onto her, secures a perfect grip on her body, and copulates. No courtship, no permission asked or granted. He has behaved "appropriately" for a male mantid. If a male doesn't behave appropriately, he may incite trouble. Positioning is everything. A male that approaches a female from the front may meet immediate death by decapitation. If he sneaks up behind her but is just a little off on his grip, the female might bite off his head and dine on her brainless suitor as he continues to pass sperm into her body. Sometimes the impetuous female partially eats the male before he even mounts her. In this case, the headless wonder swings his legs around until his body touches hers, climbs onto her back, and copulates as though nothing were amiss. Headless sex? How can it be? Copulatory movements in mantids are controlled by masses of nerve tissue in the abdomen rather than the brain. Males of some mantid species mate more effectively when decapitated. Why? A nerve center in the male's head inhibits mating until a female is clasped. If this nerve is removed, such as when the female bites off the male's head, all control is lost and the result is repeated copulation. Sometimes the female devours her mate under circum