Most Spectacular Mating
The Baum Chicka Baum Baum Award goes to common honey bees. Their mating ritual, which occurs 50 to 100 feet off the ground, is like a sexual kamikaze mission.
A horde of drones waits for the queen, and once they spot her, it's an outright race to the finish.
"[The] 'comet' of drones pursues the female, with the winner forfeiting a portion of his phallus at the end of coitus and dying soon thereafter," wrote entomologist Doug Sieglaff in The Book of Insect Records.
The queen usually mates seven to 10 times because she only gets about one-eighth to one-ninth her fill from each lover drone. She then mixes their sperm to make sure her kids are as genetically diverse as possible.
The poor drone, on the other hand, only has one chance to get it right.
Who can top that?
Image: Louise Docker / Wikimedia Commons.