Istanbul's blog

**Posted:** Sun Oct 07, 2007 1:06 am

So the gang got together for a Thanksgiving BBQ. We ended up with hamburgers as Gus could not locate the turkey.

EmmyLou had inherited a couple of lovebirds from the estate of her late Aunt Helmsley. They were a couple so she expected them to reproduce after some months. But to her dismay they ignored the hint of 3 marbles in a makeshift baby crib/nest.
So once again current affairs and recent book reviews went out the window in favour of reproduction. The birds and the bees were the topic of the day.

Gus brought up a recent Texas University report where bird fertility rates were boosted if the male anticipates that a sexual encounter is just around the corner.

The unorthodox study involved 28 male quails, 14 female quails, and two chambers: a green one near a noisy room and a white one on an isolated table.
The males were put into each of the chambers for a brief period daily over a period of five days. Half were given access to a female immediately after their time in the green chamber but not the white: for the other half it was the opposite.

The male quails therefore came to associate one chamber with the act of copulation.
"We can take anything and make it a romantic setting if there is the anticipation of sex," said Michael Domjan, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
"We concluded the experiment by pairing the males with single females. One male would go into the romantic chamber and then have access to the female, then one would go into the non-romantic chamber and then have access to the same female," Domjan, one of the authors of the study, told Reuters by telephone.

Using DNA testing the researchers then tracked the paternity of the eggs and found that the males who anticipated the act of copulation fertilized 72 percent of the eggs laid by the female quail.
The study, published online on Thursday in the September issue of Psychological Science, concluded that the anticipation of mating appeared to induce them to produce more offspring.

Edith of the MC was not convinced. She cited the case of Sibu the Orangutan.
He has miffed his Dutch keepers by refusing to mate with females and showing sexual interest only in tattooed human blonds. ( Male humans share 97% DNA with these guys!) :wink:

Apenheul Primate Park hoped Sibu would become its breeding male when he arrived two years ago, but orangutans aren't his type.
"He chases them, or ignores them, but he doesn't do what he should do," said a spokeswoman for the park.

Instead, Sibu fancies his female keepers, especially blonds. That, the spokeswoman said, was common for orangutans but Sibu has a fetish for tattoos, harking back to a heavily tattooed keeper who reared him.

Emmy couldn't suppress a yawn and wanted to know what that had to do with her lovebirds?

I reminded her that the Mayans believed that a yawn is an expression of sexual interest.
She said I should go spend time in her newly decorated lime green bathroom. Not sure if she thought I was full of it or it was to be prep time?