The Nature of Sex (1992)

From the sea horse that mates in an hypnotic underwater ballet to the rodent who copulates until he literally drops dead, THE NATURE OF SEX spans the globe to illustrate how an astonishing diversity of life forms find their mates and conceive, raise, and protect their offspring. This Web companion to the four-part series takes a close look at the primal instinct that causes animals to come together in order to pass along their genes to the next generation. We also examine how timing can be key in the mating process, and how varied sex contracts create not only new life, but diversity, in both animals and humans.

Part 1: The Primal Instinct
“All nature’s creatures,” the British novelist Graham Swift once wrote, “join to express nature’s purpose.” And that purpose is illustrated in delightful and sometimes dizzying detail in NATURE’s THE NATURE OF SEX. As Part 1: THE PRIMAL INSTINCT shows, birds, bees, and even barnacles and naked mole rats are driven to join forces to reproduce and pass along their genes to the next generation.

Part 2: A Time And A Place
There is nothing more romantic than a moonlit night. So goes many a love song. But for animals from bat rays to wriggling, seagoing palolo worms, the moon is more than a romantic backdrop — it’s a key signal that the time has come to mate. Such sexual signals are the focus of A TIME AND A PLACE, Part 2 of NATURE’s THE NATURE OF SEX. From the changing phases of the moon to subtle chemical surges, the program outlines the many cues that trigger sexual activity. Indeed, without these landmarks, many animals would send their newborns into the world at the wrong place and wrong time, with little chance of survival.

Part 3: The Sex Contract
Every year, millions of brides and grooms promise to love and care for each other ’till death do they part. It’s a profound promise. But marriage is also just one of the natural world’s many mating arrangements, as THE SEX CONTRACT, Part 3 of NATURE’s THE NATURE OF SEX shows. Throughout nature, males and females negotiate a wide range of carefully made plans for conceiving and raising offspring.

Part 4: The Human Animal
Was it his eyes or hair? Was it her nose or smile? People don’t always know what attracted them to a potential mate. But it is certain that the roots of that attraction reach far back into the human past, when our ancestors were foraging You will need QuickTime 3 or above to view this clip. across some African plain. As explained in SEX AND THE HUMAN ANIMAL, Part 4 of NATURE’s THE NATURE OF SEX, our sexual behavior evolved to improve the odds that our offspring would survive to have their own children.

Part 5: A Miracle in the Making
A Miracle in the Making depicts the amazing diversity of ways animals mate, carry their young and give birth

Part 6: The Young One
The Young Ones presents the amazing variety of Nature’s parenting systems.