Even if we’re both animals, we and other species have split ways a long, long time ago. After all, they’re animals, and we’re humans. However, sex remains our only way to procreate, even if we enjoy it on a whole other level aside from making babies.

But what does enjoying it on a different level mean anyway? Well, it means we like to get freaky and include certain quirks, kinks, and fetishes to maximize our overall sexual satisfaction. We like to suck on each other’s genitals and toes, play roles, and wear unusual outfits while doing so.

On the other hand, animals don’t have that. Their goal is to pass their genes. Nevertheless, some of them are pretty odd while doing it, so allow us to introduce you to some of the most bizarre sex habits of animals worldwide.

Banana Slugs

Up to almost 10 inches (ca. 25 cm) long, banana slugs are one of the slowest animals on the planet. They average only 6 inches (ca. 15 cm) per minute. However, their slow speed and banana color aren’t the most fascinating facts about them. They are very weird and bizarre when it comes to making love with their species.

Slugs, as we all know, move around by sliding down a trail of slime. But when it’s mating season, they tend to make things more interesting. Namely, they release pheromones into their slime, leaving messages for potential partners to follow and hook up. We guess you can say they have a primitive yet effective dating network at their disposal.

When it comes to sex in animals, slugs being hermaphroditic is one of the most well-known facts. That means they have both a penis and a vagina. However, their penis is as large as the rest of their body. They literally penis-slap each other, exchanging sperm for hours. After the deed is over, they remain all sticky in a pool of their love liquid and part ways, both pregnant.

Short-Nosed Fruit Bats

Next up, we have short-nosed fruit bats and their promiscuous sex life. Both in captivity and in nature, the males enjoy having harems. However, it’s not just about the number of ladies they can gather to serve as their concubines. They create shelters — tents made from leaves — which their mating partners inhabit.

However, hospitality isn’t what makes these short-nosed rascals among our animals with unusual sex habits. They are here due to their love of oral sex. Both males and females love to lick each other’s genitals before penetration begins. But once it does, it’s nothing special; it’s just like we do it — plow, plow, plow. Still, after it’s over, males lick their penises for a couple of seconds, and it’s back to other activities like hanging upside down.

Short-Beaked Echidna

Tachyglossues aculeatus is the name of some of the weirdest yet cutest mammals in Australia. As if the country-continent wasn’t full of cute little animals, short-beaked echidnas are some of the loveliest. However, they aren’t here due to their looks. We included them because of their pervy mating habits.

You don’t have to be a creep to know about the sleeper fetish. Yep, some men and women enjoy watching porn that depicts one partner sleeping while the other takes advantage of them. But, hey! It’s all fiction. They are acting. Nevertheless, it’s not the case for short-beaked echidnas. Due to strong male competition, some literally take advantage of females when they are hibernating.

Dana Octopus Squids

Dana octopus squids are large fellas. They have eight tentacles and are pinkish in color. Yet, this is not as important for this article. The reason why they are here is because of their sexual behavior. In essence, it all comes down to shiny neon and seductive disco lights, just like in Saturday Night Fever.

Dana octopus squids have numerous spots on their bellies and beneath the eyes, which shine to indicate whether they are of the same species and sexually mature. Once they recognize each other, males and females start to intertwine around each other with their tentacles. If you watch some videos of it, you’ll see how agile they are.

Anglerfish

Scientific literature is full of talk about anglerfish. However, the reason science writers of National Geographic and other titles are so fascinated with them is the difference between male and female anglerfish. Namely, when scientists would capture this species to learn more about them, they would only find females with no hunks around. But it wasn’t until some more inspection that they would understand what was at play.

Anglerfish are usually surrounded by tiny parasites. But unlike with other animals, these parasites are actually male anglerfish. Due to their unique evolution, males are reduced to nothing more than mere fragments of their females. They can’t survive alone, so they attach to large females, sharing nutrition and sperm. It’s a weird scene, but it’s mutually beneficial, making anglerfish more than rightful participants on this list.

Female Japanese Macaques

One of the oddest sexual behaviors on this list belongs to female Japanese macaques. What makes these primates so unique is that their ladies enjoy interspecial sex — not with other primates, but with sika deer.

The idea behind this is that scientists believe that these female macaques mount deer to rub their genitals and enjoy sexual stimulation. But deer don’t do this for free, you see. Macaques leave fruits to groom them, so we can say it’s mutually beneficial.

Great Bowerbirds

Lastly, we need to talk about the great bowerbirds. In case you were thinking about how humans are the only species who have artistic skills, you are wrong. Not only are male bowerbirds artistic and creative, but they use it to flirt with their ladies. Namely, they gather all sorts of colorful debris, including man-made stuff like rifle shells and broken glass, and place it in their bowers.

These bowers are some sort of love shrines that are open for investigation for the females. Depending on how colorful and epic the bower is, the female will decide whether they will stay there and mate with the artist. But once the deed is over, the lady will leave, allowing the male bowerbird to start preparing his shrine all over for the new season.

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If you thought humans were kinky and bizarre in the sack, wait until you’ve heard a tale or two about animals and their weird reproductive practices. Trust us — you’ll be glad you’re a featherless biped! Let’s talk about science and reproduction.

Banana Slugs Reproduce With Penises on Their Heads

The banana slug with a physique that resembles the long, hard, yellow fruit is an animal that is infamous for its gigantic genitalia, measuring almost the size of its body. It emerges from an opening from its head and grows to about 6 to 8 inches when it’s time to mate. 

These shell-less gastropods are hermaphroditic creatures, which means both come to copulate with a member typically so huge that its scientific name, Ariolimax dolichophallus, actually translates to “long penis.”  

During intercourse, the two intersexed creatures come together and moisten their skins with tentacles, an act that resembles kissing or foreplay. They then intertwine their wormlike bodies so that their erections are locked and connected as they proceed to pump and swamp pools of sperm into the receiving end of the other. This can last for hours at a time, all day, until they are ready to part ways. In some cases, they gnaw off either or both penises before they split. 

Giraffes Undergo Cycles of Fertility

Unlike many of their friends, giraffes are not bound by a mating season to reproduce. They are free to have sex all year round, but the male will have to find the perfect chance to breed as the window of opportunity is small. The female is constantly on the move, leaving little time for comfort. And they experience an estrous cycle of ovulation that lasts about 14 days.

First, he has to catch up to her. Then he must pound her lightly to encourage urination. After smelling her pee to determine if her hormones are at peak levels for impregnation, he follows her around for days until she stands still long enough for him to successfully mount her for intercourse. He has seconds to ejaculate before she’s off and running again. Probably with child — never to be seen again. 

The “Traumatic Insemination” of Bed Bugs

No one would think to sympathize with a bed bug. If you are unfortunate enough to carry them home or to work, the blood-sucking pests are nothing but a burden. But consider for a moment the nature of how they multiply, and you might muster some compassion. 

Bed bugs reproduce by a process called “traumatic insemination,” where the male uses his needle penis to break into the hard abdomen of the female. He then releases his semen into her hemolymph, or circulatory system, through the resulting wound. It makes humans sex seem a touch less savage. 

The break in the shell does come at a cost, affecting her health and vulnerability. The piercing is open to infection and requires time to heal. Females have evolved a pair of sperm-receptacles, or spermalege, intended to lessen the damage. After a few days of feeding, she is ready to lay her eggs.

Cannibalistic Ways of Female Praying Mantis

It is no secret that the female praying mantis will bite the head off of her mate after coitus. Sexual cannibalism is the practice of consuming a sexual partner before, during, or after intercourse out of anger, frustration, passion, and, more logically, for energy. When the mantis eats her partner, the enzymes allow her to lay more eggs. 

The female of the species is a flightless insect, larger than her counterpart. She will release pheromones to attract her mate, who will respond and court her. She won’t always take him for a meal, though. The mantis will only devour her partner about a quarter of the time. 

Unlike other cannibalistic creatures, the male mantis can repeatedly breed until their luck runs out and they rendezvous with the wrong one. His sperm is then carried away by the female to her eggs waiting somewhere on a leaf.

Honey Bees Are Known for Their Sexual Suicide

The drone, or male honey bee, doesn’t sting. They are alive only to take the chance at breeding with their virgin royalty, the queen bee. She takes a nuptial flight, where she swings around the colony, swarmed by suitors, allowing the most confident and strong drones to mate with her whilst in mid-air until she has had enough. 

The drone will grab her and aggressively insert his endophallus into her vagina, then quickly ejaculate with such force that his penis and part of his abdomen will rip away, rendering him immediately lifeless. Others will remove his remains from the queen’s body and continue the process, leaving a trail of bodies as evidence. The “unlucky” bees left behind are cast away from the hive to survive in the cold. 

Male Anglerfish Bites Into His Mates Body

The mysterious, deep-sea Anglerfish is not a very attractive animal, and neither is their reproductive ritual. This terrifying-looking, sharp-toothed creature has an odd method of coexisting called parasitic mating. 

The Ceratioid males are attracted to their hosts via pheromones emitted by the females of the species. She will also flash a bioluminescent light off her head to lure him in. Once they connect, he bites into her, permanently latching onto her system. He then proceeds to fuse into her body, completely melting away all his unnecessary parts until he is barely noticeable. Their skin and blood vessels will join together. He will take everything he needs to survive directly from her through symbiosis, as the two lover fish have, forever, become one.

Alligators Having Erect Penises for the Rest of Their Life

Compared to its massive size, the penis of an alligator is merely ten centimeters (under four inches) long, on average. It is pale white and, when it is time to breed, springs out and retracts like a powerful bungee. Another detail worth mentioning is that the alligator’s phallus is in a constant state of erection. The reptilian penis stays hidden inside an orifice of the pelvis called the cloaca until it is needed for use. 

Scientists are still studying how it maintains form, but unlike most penis that inflate or swell upon arousal, the alligator’s members seem to stay hard for life. This is because it is filled with thick, dense layers of fibrous collagen protein that keep it rigid and impenetrable. Alligators will begin to court their potential partners as the weather gets warmer in late spring/early summer. They flirt in the water by running their snouts together, which, after everything we’ve said about animal reproduction, seems rather sweet, does it not?

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Most of the single-celled organisms in the world, like bacteria, reproduce asexually by making copies of themselves. So how did sex come to rule the animal kingdom? Scientists have been trying to figure out the origin of sex for hundreds of years, without much luck.

Asexual reproduction is more convenient and requires less effort: there’s no search for a partner and you get to pass all your genes along, from the U.K.’s National History Museum:

In many ways asexual reproduction is the better evolutionary strategy: only one parent is needed and all of their genes are passed on to the next generation.  All bacteria, most plants and even some animals reproduce asexually at least some of the time.
Sex is less efficient. Finding a mate can take time and energy, and any gametes that aren’t fertilised go to waste. Plus, each parent only passes half of its genes to the offspring.

But 99 percent of multicelled animals use sex to reproduce. They form gametes, mix those together and create progeny with an entirely new genome.  Scientists have long wondered what processes caused sex to evolve and become so incredibly prevalent in the animal world.

Most hypotheses about the evolution of sex point out that when genes are mixed between individuals sexually, bad genetic mutations can be eliminated more quickly than in asexual reproduction. But, since the 1880s, scientists have been unable to prove one hypothesis or another explains Megan Scudellari in Scientist magazine:

In 1886, German evolutionary biologist August Weismann proposed that sexual reproduction reshuffles genes to create “individual differences” upon which natural selection acts. Additional ideas have emerged since Weismann’s hypothesis: sex rids the genome of deleterious mutations; sex rapidly introduces beneficial mutations; sex helps organisms dodge parasitic infections. Yet these evolutionary justifications for sex have remained hypotheses because there is not enough evidence to suggest that any of them provide enough of a benefit to surmount the exquisitely high costs of sex, which include the time and energy it takes to find a mate, the passage of only half of one’s genes to the next generation, and the breaking apart of favorable gene combinations.

Part of the problem, Sculdellari says, is where scientists look to try to test these ideas. Most of the organisms we know the most about sexually like flies, humans and bacteria only reproduce sexually or asexually. But there are some species that can do both depending on the environmental circumstances surrounding them. Yeast, snails and rotifers, microscopic freshwater animals reproduce both sexually and asexually. By studying these organisms, scientists can compare the relative health of their asexually and sexually produced offspring.

The Red Queen hypothesis, named after the Alice in Wonderland character, suggests that sex is really about eliminating the chance of disease through the exchange of cell surface genes that alter the proteins where diseases try to invade:

The Red Queen hypothesis for sex is simple: Sex is needed to fight disease. Diseases specialize in breaking into cells, either to eat them, as fungi and bacteria do, or, like viruses, to subvert their genetic machinery for the purpose of making new viruses. To do that they use protein molecules that bind to other molecules on cell surfaces. The arms races between parasites and their hosts are all about these binding proteins. Parasites invent new keys; hosts change the locks. For if one lock is common in one generation, the key that fits it will spread like wildfire. So you can be sure that it is the very lock not to have a few generations later.

Evidence in a species of New Zealand lake snail shows that those that produced sexually were much less likely to be infected by a common parasite than those that were the product of asexual production. But in subsequent generations that pattern flips, which may mean that for organisms that go both ways, reproductively, the ability to switch itself conveys a benefit.

Looking for evidence explaining why sex persevered is even more complicated. We may someday know why sex started in the first place, but figuring out why asexual reproduction was never resurrected in the animal kingdom is trickier.

Sex allows species to adapt to the loss of food sources, the arrival of parasites, rising temperatures, and more. There is some doubt, however, whether the environment fluctuates fast enough to warrant the prevalence and persistence of sex in the eukaryotic kingdom. “Is the force favoring sex large enough in the face of the costs?” asks theoretical biologist Sally Otto. “The niggling doubt in the back of my head is that it is not.”

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When it comes to getting creative in the bedroom, we humans may think we’re the experts. In fact, we’ve barely scratched the surface of how varied and multifaceted reproduction can be—just look at species that do the deed through kinky-sounding strategies like sperm sequestration, “virgin births” via cloning or even hybridizing with other species. These may sound like show plots of a new series on the Space Channel, but they’re actually just some of the many tricks that Mother Nature uses to stay a few steps ahead of Cosmopolitan Magazine’s sex tips.

Moreover, some of these unconventional methods are making scientists rethink the basic tenets of reproductive biology, says Ingo Schlupp, a professor of biology at the University of Oklahoma. His study subject, the asexual Amazon molly fish, defies the so-called rules of reproduction by making perfect clones of itself, sans males. With such a lack of genetic diversity, these finger-sized fish should have been wiped out by disease long ago, Schlupp points out.

“How on earth do these guys survive for such a long time without any recombination?” he says. “To me that’s a real head scratcher. Here’s a species that doesn’t [recombine their genes every generation] and theoretically should have been dead many thousands of generations ago, but yet they’re living happily.”

We still haven’t unraveled all the mysteries. But one thing’s for certain: The more we learn about “alternative “reproduction strategies across species, the more we realize that many of them might not be so alternative after all. Now that they know what to look for, biologists are finding more and more cases of strange and hitherto unknown forms of animal procreation. In other words, baby-making outside the “traditional” male-female pairing could be far more widespread than we humans are inclined to think.

Roughly 100,000 years ago, in a romantic lagoon near Tampico on Gulf side of Mexico, two distinct fish species—a sailfin molly male and an Atlantic molly female—came together in an unlikely union. The colorful pair gave birth to the Amazon molly: an all-female, asexually reproducing mini-carrot length fish named after the all-female tribes of Greek legend, according to Schlupp of the University of Oklahoma.

Yet while these Amazons need no male genetic material to reproduce, they’re not entirely independent. To kickstart their reproductive systems, they still need sperm. In a bid to find a suitor into this kind of thing, Amazons will actually disrupt mating processes between sexually reproducing mollies they come across in an effort to steal the male’s seed from his erstwhile mate—by literally squeezing in between the pair.

“They kind of butt in and then it’s almost as if they’re hoping to get the mating that was meant for another female,” Schlupp says. “The males that these Amazon mollies are mating with really have to get up close and personal with the Amazon mollies. These fishes have a specialized fin that they use to transfer sperm—we’re actually talking about real copulation. It’s not like a mass spawning where some parasitic female swoops in and gathers some sperm.”

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You must have seen the famous squishies by now. They are everywhere. In stores, on Instagram, at your friends’ house – they’ve become omnipresent.

But, you may be wondering what precisely they are. Worry not, you’re not alone. Simply put, they are squishies. You may think this doesn’t explain anything, but it does. You squish them, hence the name.

What are squishies?

These soft toys are made from polyurethane foam. When you first take them in your hand, they’ll have a similar feel to a stress ball. But, they are so much more. Like a stress ball, you can squeeze them as much as you like and they’ll always revert to their original form. However, unlike the stress ball, they come in many fun shapes and sizes.

You can get animal squishies, food squishies or a squishy that looks like your favorite cartoon character. The possibilities are endless! And, we mean that. You can even get a combination squishy, like a mix between your favorite food and animal. It might sound weird, but it’s adorable, believe us!

Looks so pretty and smells even better

If the fun size and the bright colors aren’t enough for you, you can get a scented squishy, as well. Most of the scents are food-related, so your banana squishy can smell like a banana, too. Imagine squeezing your cookie squishy and smelling that freshly-baked scent all day. Sounds nice, right?

Size is everything

Just because they’re usually small, it doesn’t mean you have to limit yourself to a tiny squishy. You can also get jumbo-sized squishies for your bed or desk. Or, you can go even smaller and get a tiny one for your keychain.

Who thought of this?

The Japanese, of course. These squishies are the epitome of Kawaii, a word that means “cute”or “adorable” in Japanese. In fact, squishies were born in the capital of cuteness – the Harajuku district of Tokyo. They were created over thirty years ago as a toy appealing to all ages. They have been a beloved pastime in Japan ever since. However, their popularity outside of Japan started skyrocketing just recently.

The first squishies were in the form of famous Japanese characters, like Hello Kitty and  Rilakkuma. However, soon the trend started to spread like wildfire, and squishies soon took the shape of favorite snacks, beverages, animals, etc.

The soft design and delicate texture made them instantly popular among both young and adult kawaii culture lovers. They come in all sizes, so they can be used as accessories for bags and briefcases, phones, keychains and so much more.

Why are they such a trend?

Squishies are perfect accessories, bringing that much-needed touch of cuteness to your outfit. They also help people express their interests and hobbies. Furthermore, they are great collectibles.

Squishies are a real dream for collectors of cute pop culture paraphernalia. You can collect them and swap them with friends, or show off your collection to other enthusiasts.

However, that’s not all. Squishies are also great stress relievers. They function like a stress ball. You can use them to get rid of excess energy and focus on one task while your stress levels go down. They’ll never lose shape, no matter how many times you squeeze them. They are soft and have a pleasant texture, so you’ll enjoy playing with them.

A soft, brightly-colored stress relief? What more could you ask for, really? Carry them in your bag, on your keychain or phone for instant access to the most adorable stress relief ever.

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