Batjobs: A Halloween Sex Tale

As if being a flying furball wasn't already cool enough, research scientists in China have discovered not only that bats engage in fellatio, but that it apparently prolongs sex by considerable margins.

If you ever wondered why Bruce Wayne picked the bat as his superhero avatar, you can stop now. Just in time for Halloween, research funded by the Guangdong Province Academy of Science in China, and released October 28, has delivered another blow to the dwindling set of "unique" human attributes. Not content with having exposed the sexually liberated behaviour of bonobos (Pan paniscus), scientists have now turned their attention to the often overlooked bat, uncovering in the process the pervasiveness of female-to-male fellatio in the short-nosed fruit bat (Cynopterus sphinx). From the report:

"Female bats often lick their mate's penis during dorsoventral copulation. The female lowers her head to lick the shaft or the base of the male's penis but does not lick the glans penis which has already penetrated the vagina. Males never withdrew their penis when it was licked by the mating partner. A positive relationship exists between the length of time that the female licked the male's penis during copulation and the duration of copulation. Furthermore, mating pairs spent significantly more time in copulation if the female licked her mate's penis than if fellatio was absent." [Abstract from: "Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time"]

The research team captured 60 wild fruit bats from a local park and filmed their amorous encounters with night-vision cameras. 70% of the videos in which the bats engaged in sex featured fellatio, and in those instances, the bat couple enjoyed, on average, 100 seconds more sex than the usual average of 2 minutes. Inspiring both humour and surprise from a grateful Internet, some commentators have not hesitated to bestow the discovery with the necessary scientific gravitas of traditional charts and diagrams. Aside from the seemingly obvious, the question has to be asked: Why? If, in the interest of scientific objectivity, pleasure-giving is set aside, there may be valid evolutionary reasons for the behaviour, such as increasing the success of fertilisation, hogging a mate or even preventing the propagation of STDs. And while it may be difficult to take a serious moral from the story, it does appear that cooperation leading to longer copulation is a win-win for all involved. Although, perhaps it does lend credence to the old admonishment about certain behaviours leading to blindness.