Odd Couples: Extraordinary Differences between the Sexes in the Animal Kingdom

The remarkable and unique ways that male and female animals play out gender roles in nature

While we joke that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, our gender differences can't compare to those of many other animals. For instance, the male garden spider spontaneously dies after mating with a female more than fifty times his size. And male blanket octopuses employ a copulatory arm longer than their own bodies to mate with females that outweigh them by four orders of magnitude. Why do t...