This just in: for fiddler crabs, like humans, sex is the most basic form of currency. All fiddler crabs have their own territory. Male fiddler crabs will defend any female’s territory from any invader, assuming of course that she fucks him. Now, this seems like normal behavior to me, but these scientist fucks in Australia seem to think it’s a big deal.

In the world of fiddler crabs, the best form of protection for females is, apparently, having sex with the neighbors, according to an Australian study published Wednesday.
Researchers from The Australian National University in Canberra found male fiddler crabs will happily defend a nearby female against intruders — partly because the females will dole out sex in return.
“The fact that the neighbor comes over and helps to defend another territorial individual is pretty unusual,” said Michael Jennions, who helped conduct the study, the results of which were published in the journal Biology Letters.

“This study shows, for the first time, that in exchange for sex and other benefits, males protect their female neighbors from territory-seeking male intruders. The paper provides the first evidence of ‘defense coalitions’ between territorial males and females,” he said.

Jennions and fellow ANU researchers Richard Milner and Patricia Backwell studied the behavior of fiddler crabs living in mud flats off the African country of Mozambique in October and November 2008. Male fiddler crabs have giant claws to defend themselves, but the researchers wanted to see how female crabs — which only have two small feeding claws — protect their homes.

Fiddler crabs are territorial and live in burrows. The researchers gathered crabs from distant parts of the mud flats and tethered them near new, occupied burrows. In 21 trials involving male intruders, the researchers found that male crabs would scuttle over to fight off the invaders on a female neighbor’s territory 95 percent of the time. But in 20 trials involving female intruders, the males crabs only fought off the invaders 15 percent of the time.

That suggests the male crabs preferred to keep females nearby, largely because they will almost always have sex with their male neighbors, Jennions said.

I took a few science class as an undergrad and this seems to follow everything I’ve ever learned. Men fight off other men – and then fuck the women. When I read the headline “Fiddler crabs exchange sex for survival” – I ran to post it here, as you readers seem to be acutely interested in sex for money.

After reading it just though, I realize that this whole post is an epic fail. I would delete it, but if I don’t meet my quota, Life at 160 gets all pissy – and I really need my $9 paycheck this month.

“But to have that sort of encompass the territories of the females as part of his sexual territory sounds quite interesting,” said Davie, who has spent 30 years studying crabs.

[source]

Fucking really? Men having a territory that includes that of their females is that interesting? This guy spent 30 years studying crabs and didn’t notice this?

I really don’t know what to say, so here’s the last line of the article, which is just as uninteresting as the rest of it.

Swapping sex for favors is not unheard of in the animal kingdom. Antarctica’s Adelie penguins exchange sex for highly coveted stones used for nest building.