Flyingfish

We all know about those birds which are just at home in the water as they are in the air, however, not too many species of fish can say the same thing. Flying fish can actually stay up in the air for more than half a minute, and can glide as far as 400 meters and reach speeds of up to 70 kilometers per hour!

A mechanical engineer from Seoul National University in Korea, Haecheon Choi, took a shine to the flying fish as he was reading a science book to his children. By coming to the realization that flying fish actually FLY, he and his collegue, Hyungmin Park, set about to figure out just how these fish stay up in the air so long and then publish their discovery in The Journal of Experimental Biology, which they did this past 10th of September. They had some remarkable results in tsts conducted in a wind tunnel of all places.. They found that the flying fish were just as efficient at gliding as birds were, and more effective than many forms of insects at it.

Now that Choi and Park have proven to the world that flying fish are exceptional fliers, they are now setting up for their next big task.. Building an aircraft which will exploit the ground effect aerodynamics which flying fish use to their benefit.

pond skater

And you think this sort of thing only happens in people society… Apparently the male pond skaters play on the fears of females to coerce them into having sexual intercourse. The fear that they tap into is the fear of predators.

This rather surprising sexual behavior was discovered by Professors Chang Han and Piotr Jablonski of Seoul National University in South Korea.

Female pond skaters appear to have the upper hand when it comes to when and if they engage in sexual intercourse because they have a “chastity belt” type covering over their genitals. This means that a male pond skater can only get some action if and when the female decides to let them in.

However, Professors Han and Jablonski have found that males will cause ripples in the surface of the water during courtship rituals, and these ripples attract fish from down below.

The male will keep making these ripples in the water, until the female consents to have sexual intercourse with him, much like a child will stamp his feet to get his way. However, this obviously has more severe implications for the pond skater than the child, as the child won’t be eaten by something if they don’t stop.

What makes this all the more interesting, is that the females were more likely to give in to the male’s desire to engage in sexual activity if she had experienced a predator attack in the past.

However, there was no conclusive link to see if a male was less persistent if the same had happened to him…