A&E

Volume CXXXIII, Number 3
September 26, 2003
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"The birds and the bees" for the birds and the bees
TED REINERT
ORIENT STAFF

We finally have a science book that makes animal sex as entertaining as it should be. In Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation, published last year, evolutionary biologist and science journalist Olivia Judson assumes the alter ego of Dr. Tatiana, "preeminent sexpert in all creation," to answer Dear Abby-style questions from the animals themselves. For example, praying mantis "I Like 'Em Headless in Lisbon" writes about how she likes to bite her lover's heads off before sex: "Somehow they seem less inhibited, more urgent-it's fabulous."

Over the course of 13 chapters, Dr. Tatiana provides a comprehensive survey of the sexual habits of the animal kingdom and beyond, from masturbation in marine iguanas to homosexuality in manatees to incestuous orgies in mites to completely asexual bdelloid rotifers. Her topics also include cannibalism, rape, ultra-promiscuous females, males 1/200,000 the size of their lovers who dwell in said lovers' reproductive tracts, and upside-down, hanging-off-a-tree slug sex. It's breathtaking, and it even gets the black vultures, "champions of fidelity" that they are, complaining about obscenity.

Of course, Judson explains it all. She lays out all the theories and hypotheses. Everything has evolved for a reason, and it all comes down to genetics. As Dr. Tatiana portrays it, the battle of the sexes has gone on for millennia, with the girls countering the boys' newly-evolved weapons with evolutions of their own and vice versa.

Judson has gone through hundreds of scientific papers to present us with the fun stuff and the way she boils it down into something that makes sense to the layperson is applause-worthy. Plus, Dr. Tatiana always has a tongue-in-cheek comment up her sleeve to keep us amused.

To be honest, as the book goes on and tackles creatures outside the animal kingdom, like slime molds, the responses to letters lengthen and the explanations get more technical. Judson may be trying to temper this when she writes several of her chapter summaries in rhyming verse, which is a cute attempt but the worst of her jokes.

More successfully, in the final chapter she pulls out all stops, abandoning the sex column format to give an account of an episode of Dr. Tatiana's TV show, a sort of zoological Love Line, in which a guest's feat of asexual reproduction for 85 million years nearly causes a riot between the regulars and radical feminists. This comes as a surprise and it works, giving the book a great climax.

It is evident that Judson had the time of her life playing Dr. Tatiana, and it rubs off on the reader. Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation is both educational and very entertaining. If Bowdoin made this the mandatory summer reading for the class of 2008, the number of students signing up for Biology majors might shoot up by 50 percent.

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