Fruit Bat Head: Speculations on the Function of Oral

Everything has a reason, they say. Yesterday Maggie Koerth-Baker at BoingBoing reported on a team of researchers trying to figure out how head plays into the scheme of things by studying the oral habits of fruit bats.

In their paper, published on October 28th in the journal PLoS ONE, researchers Min Tan, Gareth Jones, Guangjian Zhu, et. al. explain that bats who engage in oral end up copulating for longer than those who don’t warm things up.

The team has several theories on the benefits of foreplay:

Oral sex could be doing everything from increasing the chances of sperm fertilizing egg, to killing bacteria on the penis and protecting both parties from sexually transmitted disease. Of course, the only thing proven is that oral sex means longer sex in fruit bats.

Naturally, this is all speculation. But yes, by all means, give us more reason to engage in this behavior.

Read more about bats and oral sex at The Huffington Post.

Thumbnail photo by Diana Lili.