reproduction

Sex for a female Lake Eyre dragon lizard is sometimes like going to bed with a man and a roaring chainsaw. The male lizard bites her neck before mounting her. If he sinks his teeth in with too much vigor, he can chomp her spinal cord and kill her.

So it's no wonder the lady lizards are choosy about sex.

When it comes to contraception, women have their pick of techniques. In addition to sperm-blocking barriers and foreign objects in the uterus (IUDs), there are about a million ways to pump extra hormones into the bloodstream (pill, patch, ring, shot, or implant).

For men, it's always been pretty much condoms or a vasectomy.

New York City was full of mysteries this week: Who was the idiot that approved the low-flying plane? Does being near the swine flu outbreak in Queens outweigh the benefits of all the delicious ethnic food in that borough? Who misplaced their 60-pound tortoise?

Also in today's links: sadistic spider sex, questionable professional practice and more.

Making babies requires a male and a female, a sperm and an egg, right? Well, the wild world of animals is often more creative than the lot of us humans when it comes to making whoopee. In fact, some animals don't have sex at all, thank you very much.

Just this month, bug biologists found the first all-female ant species, Mycocepurus smithii. The queen ant clones herself by making eggs that develop into adult females without fertilization. Some of those females will then become queens themselves. Apparently the species has been sexless for enough generations that the ants might not be able to mate even if they wanted to. Dissections showed that a key female sex part that normally interlocks with a male organ during mating had shrunken to a ghost of its former self.

The movie Blue Velvet was creepy and sexy and intriguing and uncomfortable, but it ain't got nothing on Isabella Rossellini's roles as various sorts of horny insects and other small creatures. In the bizarre Green Porno series, she explains their reproductive habits, complete with lurid close-ups, costumes, moans and first-person narratives. Here she is as a bee, snail, earthworm, spider and dragonfly.

Fans of the series will be overjoyed to hear that Green Porno 2 is on its way. According to Ms. Rossellini, upcoming episodes deal with sea creatures, so hopefully we'll get some more on the joys of squid sex. And think how pretty she'd be as a one of the newly found rainbow jellyfish! I have no idea how jellyfish reproduce, so I'd watch that episode. "The animals that live in the ocean are so different than us. In their sexual behavior, marine creatures are even more scandalous than bugs," she says.

Also in today's links: more animal sex, chimps seeking honey, and a science minister who tried to dodge the evolution question.

Plus, another population has success reproducing the old-fashioned way.