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One Picture  Bookmark and Share  Book Excerpt Not Tonight, Honey
Peek into a harlequin (frog) romance, and a few other species’
mating rituals.  Sexy Orchids Make Lousy Lovers & Other Unusual
Relationships By Marty Crump The University of Chicago Press,
214 pages, $25  Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes.
There’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.  —Henry Kissinger
We joke that from a reproductive standpoint men are “expendable”
because they can contribute to reproduction often and over a
long period of time. They’re a dime a dozen. In contrast,
females are more “valuable” because they can reproduce only a
small number of times in their lives.  Is there any biological
basis to the expendable/valuable argument? Yes, and humans
aren’t alone in this regard. Bear with me a moment before we get
to the stories. One c