Time to swear off the animal stories?

OK, so there are definitely worse things in the big, wide, natural world than the female orangutan's 7-year dry spell. Take the sex life of the male blanket octopus. The male blanket octopus is two centimeters long; the female blanket octopus is two meters long and weighs as much as 40,000 times as much as the male. "Fine," you say. "But some men like their women large." Amen to that, but… and, in this case, it's not a big but… that's not the point of the story. It's interesting, but not the point. The point is that these little guys are out there, literally dying to have sex.

You see, for the male blanket octopus to mate with the female blanket octopus, he uses his penis to inject sperm into his special reproductive arm which then gets cut off and passed —sperm and all —to the female. The male then dies while the female swims away to mate with other males, sometimes gathering several arms in her gill cavity before ever using any of them to fertilize her eggs.

All of which goes to show that… there's a sucker born every minute?

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