FOXSYLVANIA

(Warning:  Some Mature content)

– –We all know the appeal of big balls, although I’ve never had to use the ballroom dancing classes my parents required me to take.  The Fox Trot came quite naturally to me, although I’ve never been prevailed upon to do the Waltz or even the Cha Cha…but enough of my ballroom notoriety…

In the animal kingdom, a species of cricket, the tuberous bushcricket (Platycleis affinis)  has been found to have, as AC/DC might sing, “…the biggest balls of them all,” testes that amount to 13.8 percent of its body mass!  This would be the rough equivalent of a human male hauling around testicles that weigh 22 pounds!  I don’t know what this would translate to in foxes, but they’d probably be pretty impressive…

It is thought that the extra large testes in bushcrickets (also known in North America as katydids) allow males to mate repeatedly without their sperm reserves being exhausted…to say nothing of their bragging rights!

The research appears in “Biology Letters,” a journal of Britain’s Royal Society…(heh, and you thought they were stuffy!)

…and AC/DC rocks!–Woo!

This entry was posted on November 18, 2010 at 12:54 am and is filed under animal oddities, animals, insects, research. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: bushcricket record testicles, gonad greatness