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The female stood with the tail held sharply to one side, and the quills on the back lying very flat. The male stood on his hind legs, while the front legs grasped the sides of the female. There was no repetition of the act. The male's urethra is 115-120 mm long, and his penis is 75 mm, so the he doesn't need to be as close to the female as one ...

As both @Rory M and @Alexander Galkin suggest, there are various non-visual mating behaviors to allow these species to select mates and also allow taxonomists and researchers to identify these species. And they hit on the two major ones, courtship rituals (mating calls, throat bulging, dancing) and pheromones. Let's have a look at some two examples: The ...

While I am not sure I buy your assertion that all mammals know how to swim, I would say that humans are at least as good as dogs when swimming. If you drop a human in water we will instinctively flap around and try too keep our head out of the water in about as elegant a way as a dog. The main problem for humans is panicking. Someone who does not know how to ...

Unlike Terdon I think that you are generally correct in your assertion that animals can swim whereas humans can't (although I'm sure there are exceptions). However, I think his answer contains the real answer: Dogs can't swim as such, they simply do the same motions in the water as they do on land. There is no different action happening, they don't ...

In most species, females are pregnant as often as they can be. Since the availability of sex is rarely a limiting factor, it seems likely that female bonobos are as "always" pregnant as other chimps and socially living primates. The actual rate of pregnancy will be hormonally limited by things such as reduced fertility during lactation and so on.

There are various parameters that describe change of seasons such as day length, temperature, humidity. But it can be assumed that most of these parameters ultimately depend on one parameter- day length. The response of plants towards the length of day/night cycle is called photoperiodism (which dictates spring flowering). This article explains the effect ...

Best tip I can give you is buying a textbook or popular science book about ethology. That should give you an overview about research done in the past decades. Konrad Lorenz was a pioneer of ethology, so a book should summarize his work, e.g. this one For more current stuff look up some journals in this field: Animal Behaviour Journal of Comparative ...

Well, there are certain behaviors that may qualify. The clearest example I know of would be sexual cannibalism, and more specifically (source): The redback spider is one of only two animals to date where the male has been found to actively assist the female in sexual cannibalism. In the process of mating, the much smaller male somersaults to place ...