Some information given in this Thread surprised me.
What’s the Straight Dope on this behavior? I have never heard of dolphin gang rape before reading it here. Do they do it on porpoise?
I’d appreciate any info Dopers can provide. Please excuse me for not Googling “Dolphin Gang Rape” at work.
Interestingly, if you DO google exactly those words, what you get is mostly links to other message boards! The closest to a purely factual and reliable description of this behavior I found was here in an article about dophin encounter expeditions near Hawaii.
The workings of dolphin societies isn’t that well explored. Different regions/pods seem to have distinct social setups. Here’s a NWF article with a little more meat on it.
Excellent article. That’s the kind of thing I was looking for and couldn’t find.
Yes, it’s pretty neat stuff. When you read something like:
You’ve got to wonder. Not to anthropomorphisize, but what kind of negotiations just happened?
You know, when I perfect my invention that allows me to deliver a painful electric shock through the internet by remote control, you’re first on the list for testing…
I’ll pop for the batteries.
I also saw a story on PBS (I hope it was) that said that dolphins sometimes humans. Yep, women and men.
mangeorge
What?
We need a verb, Senator!
“pork”?
Methinks the verb is “mate with” or something more colourful. I’ve heard this same rumour too, is it true? But then, I’ve also heard that Dolphins are the only creatures who engage in sex for pleasure, although I find this very hard to believe, considering I know homosexuality is rampant in the animal kindom, as well as other non-breeding sexual activites.
IANA dolphin, and I have sex for pleasure.
Well, periodically my wife and I go on a dolphin watching boat tour of Corpus Christi Bay (this tour is run by an old hippie couple who are extremely nice EXCEPT when someone gets them on the subject of aquariums, at which point they go on major angry rants about how Sea World and the like are “abusement parks”).
This couple has come to “know” just about every dolphin in the bay, and they say that adolescent male dolphins are a lot like adolescent male humans. That is, they’re very aggressive, very horny, hang together in gangs, and harrass any female that comes close by.
As Unca Cecil has pointed out before, all animals engage in sex for pleasure. That’s what the orgasm is for.
I think the more interesting distinction is whether or not humans are the only animals who engage in sex for something other than pleasure…
Sorry!
“Hump”.
There ya go.
You’re going to have to specify “pleasure” there, rjung. Psychopaths do pretty much everything fpr pleasure.
By the way:
Today is National P for O Day.
pwned? 