The zoologist sticking her neck out in the battle of the sexes

Our ideas about males and females are wildly out of date, says zoologist Lucy Cooke. Here, she reveals some radical truths about the birds, the bees … and the bonobosLondon Zoo at half-term is a cheerful cacophony with blue macaws out-screaming six-year-olds, but in the relative calm of the lush spider “walkthrough” exhibit (apologies, arachnophobes), Lucy Cooke is happily absorbed. “Let’s see if we can see a big predatory female,” she says. We can: a gorgeously colourful golden orb weaver sits in the centre of her vast gold-tinted web, 125 times bigger than her tiny mate. “I didn’t realise that the majority of spiders are sexual cannibals, that the big spiders in the middle of webs were always female; males are basically wandering useless sacks of sperm,” Cooke says loudly in earshot of several harried-looking human fathers.This is a very Lucy Cooke observation: uncensored, pithily expressed and startlingly informative. There is plenty more of that in her new book,Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution& the Female Animal, a dazzling, funny and elegantly angry demolition of our preconceptions about female behaviour and sex in the animal kingdom (queendom?).Continue reading...

Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - March 6, 2022 Category: Science Authors: Emma Beddington Tags: Animal behaviour Biology Sex Science Life and style Books Source Type: news