Bravo for Green Porno!
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Green Porno Posted on May 20 2008 at 1:47am by Bravo to Isabella Rossellini for making these! They're wonderfully inventive and funny, while also being educational. I look forward to seeing more of her writing and directing!
(And thanks to Jimmy Kimmel for featuring them on his show tonight, which is how I found out about them, as I don't subscribe to Sundance. I would absolutely watch the channel if it were free.)
RawFoodsNewsMagazine.com [www.rawfoodsnewsmagazine.com]
RE: Bravo for Green Porno! Posted on Jun 2 2008 at 1:54am by The shorts were great. Unfortunately, the one about the praying mantis perpetuates the myth that female praying mantises customarily behead the males who mate with them. This has been debunked (I saw a great article in a UC Davis magazine back in the 1980's), but continues to appear in science textbooks because they just copy each other rather than actually checking their facts.
According to the New World Encyclopedia [www.newworldencyclopedia.org], "One of the most popular myths about praying mantids is that the female always decapitates males during copulation; while this sometimes happens, it is not commonplace in nature (Grzimek et al. 2004). It is frequently observed in captivity. If the female does cannibalize the male during copulation, he will continue to mate even without the head (Grzimek et al. 2004). The female may start feeding by biting off the male’s head (as with any prey), and if mating had begun, the male’s movements may become even more vigorous in its delivery of sperm.
"Early researchers thought that because copulatory movement is controlled by ganglion in the abdomen not the head, removal of the male’s head was a reproductive strategy by females to enhance fertilization while obtaining sustenance. Later, this bizarre behavior appeared to be an artifact of intrusive laboratory observation. Whether the behavior in the field is natural, or also the result of distractions caused by the human observer, remains controversial. Mantids are highly visual creatures, and notice any disturbance occurring in the laboratory or field such as bright lights or moving scientists."
