Do Any Animals Live as Long as Humans

Do Any Animals Live as Long as Humans

Practice animals accept sex for pleasance?

We thought nosotros were the only species to enjoy intimate interactions, but as Jason G Goldman discovers, a few curious couplings in nature have changed our view.

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Sexual practice, we are told, is pleasurable. Nevertheless yous probably wouldn't call up that if you lot waded through the scientific literature. That's considering most scientific accounts of sexual behaviour rest upon evolutionary explanations rather than the more immediately relevant mental and emotional experiences. To say that we have sex because it helps us to preserve our genetic legacies would exist entirely authentic, but the more than fleeting, experiential, pleasurable aspects of that most basic of social urges would exist missing. It would be similar staring at a painting with half the color spectrum removed from information technology.

One affair we have been curious virtually, though, is whether we are the only species that experiences sexual pleasure. The question of whether not-man animals enjoy information technology likewise is a perennial – and scientifically legitimate – question to ask.

In the last 10 to 15 years, scientific show has begun to accumulate that animals practise experience a general sensation of pleasure – equally anybody who has stroked a cat will know. In 2001, for example, psychologists Jeffrey Burgdorf and Jaak Panskepp discovered that laboratory rats enjoyed being tickled, emitting a sort of chirpy express mirth outside the range of human hearing. And not only that, they would actively seek out the feeling.

Nosotros know animals like cats experience a general sensation of pleasance, but does this extend to sex? (Thinkstock)

Only does that include carnal pleasure too? One way to find out is to study instances of sexual activity that tin't possibly result in procreation – for instance, among two or more males, or females; where i or more individual is sexually young, or sex that occurs outside of the convenance season.

Bonobos, for example, the so-called "hippie apes," are known for aforementioned-sexual practice interactions, and for interactions betwixt mature individuals and sub-adults or juveniles. Only you don't need to be a bonobo to enjoy "non-conceptive" sex activity, white-faced capuchin monkeys do information technology too. In both species, primatologists Joseph Manson, Susan Perry, and Amy Parish, institute that that females' solicitation of males was decoupled from their fertility. In other words, they had plenty of sex even when pregnancy was impossible – such equally when they were already pregnant, or while lactating merely post-obit birth. In addition, interactions among mature and immature individuals were just every bit mutual as interactions betwixt two adults, for both species.

If animals indulge in more than sex than is strictly necessary for conception, that likewise might hint at a pleasance-driven motivation to do the deed. A female person lion may mate 100 times per day over a menstruum of almost a week, and with multiple partners, each fourth dimension she ovulates. It but takes ane eager sperm to brainstorm the road from conception to nascence, but the lioness doesn't seem to listen. Could information technology be that she enjoys it? Similarly high rates of encounters have been observed among cougars and leopards, as well.

Researchers have been studying the broad and varied interactions that bonobos accept part in for many years (Getty Images)

Another way you might learn whether not-human animals derive pleasure is whether they have orgasms. That'due south especially true for females, since formulation does non rely on their ability to experience one. Italian researchers Alfonso Troisi and Monica Carosi spent 238 hours watching Japanese macaques, and witnessed 240 individual copulations between males and females. In a third of those copulations, they observed what they called female orgasmic responses: "the female turns her caput to expect back at her partner, reaches back with ane hand, and grasps the male."

While it's incommunicable to ask a female macaque to interrogate her feelings, it is reasonable to infer that this behaviour is similar to that experienced by human women, at least in some ways. That's in office because this macaque behaviour is sometimes accompanied by the type of physiological changes seen in humans, such as increases in heart rate and vaginal spasms. Interestingly, the female macaques were more likely to feel a response when copulating with a male who lived college-up in their monkey authority bureaucracy, suggesting that there is a social, not only physiological, component to this, not simply a reflexive responses to sexual stimulation.

Oral sex also occurs with some frequency throughout the animate being kingdom. Information technology's been observed in primates, spotted hyenas, goats and sheep. Female person cheetahs and lions lick and rub the males' genitals as a function of their courtship ritual. Oral sexual activity is also well known among brusk-nosed fruit bats, for whom it is thought to prolong copulation, thereby increasing the likelihood of fertilisation.

In short-nosed fruit bats, oral sex is thought to help increase the likelihood of fecundation (Thinkstock)

The about instructive example may come from a study of two convict male brown bears published before this year in the journal Zoo Biology. Over the course of six years, researchers clustered 116 hours of behavioural observations, which included 28 acts of oral sex betwixt the 2 bears, who lived together in an enclosure at a sanctuary in Croatia.

The researchers, led past Agnieszka Sergiel of the Polish Academy of Sciences Department of Wild animals Conservation, doubtable that the behaviour began as a issue of early on deprivation of suckling behaviour, since both bears were brought to the sanctuary as orphans, before they were fully weaned from their absentee mothers. It persisted for years, even after the bears aged out of cub-hood, perhaps because it remained pleasurable and satisfying.

In well-nigh cases, researchers rely on evolutionary mechanisms to explain such animal behaviour, to resist the pull of anthropomorphosis. As ethologist Jonathan Balcombe writes in Practical Animal Behaviour Science: "Pain's unpleasantness helps steer the animal away from 'bad' behaviours that adventure the greater evolutionary disaster of death. Similarly, pleasance encourages animals to behave in 'good' means, such as feeding, mating, and…staying warm or absurd."

Could the urge in animals and humans to vary things in diet be because there'south an in-built desire to try new things? (Thinkstock)

Yet Balcombe proposes that scientists shouldn't only view behaviour through the lens of evolution. He goes on to explicate that rats adopt unfamiliar foods after three days in which they're only given a single type of nutrient to eat. The simplest explanations for that pattern suggest that the rats' behaviour is adaptive because a diversity of foods allows them to ingest a wider range of nutrients, or maybe because it allows them to avert overdependence on a possibly limited food source. But is that besides narrow a view, when it's equally plausible that the rats merely became bored with their food and wanted to try something new? To spice things up a scrap? Both explanations are probably true, depending on whether you take an expansive, zoomed-out perspective, or a more immediate, zoomed-in perspective.

Too, sexual behaviour tin can exist wholly enjoyable while also emerging from a deeper developmental or evolutionary origin. It is precisely because reproduction is then important to the survival of a species that evolution made it and so pleasurable that animals – both human and not-homo – are motivated to seek information technology out fifty-fifty when formulation is undesirable or impossible. The urge to seek out that sort of pleasure, writes Balcombe, "is a combination of instinct on the one manus, and a powerful desire to achieve reward on the other." If so, it'south clear why these powerful feelings of pleasure aren't but restricted to u.s.a. humans.

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Do Any Animals Live as Long as Humans

Source: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140613-do-animals-have-sex-for-fun