A male short-nosed fruit bat (referred to as a "dog bat" in Chinese) hangs from a fan-palm leaf in Guangzhou. Photo: Zhang Libiao, published in the Global Times.
Two of this year’s Ig Nobel Biology Prize winners and more than 200 science enthusiasts gathered Sunday at the National Zoological Museum of China in Chaoyang district to watch bat pornography and discuss findings related to fruit bat fellatio, the study of which earned the first Ig Nobel Prize for researchers from the Chinese mainland earlier this month.
Questions raised at the discussion included whether fellatio is hereditary or learned, whether females perform fellatio to improve status within a community (a fruit bat community consists of one male and multiple females) and whether oral sex is an evolutionary need or is just used to service a male’s enjoyment.
Zhang and Tan both said that proving any of their group’s hypotheses would be difficult since it is virtually impossible to raise fruit bats in a lab.
Other researchers involved in the Ig Nobel-winning study included China’s Zhu Guangjian, Ye Jianping, Hong Tiyu, Zhou Shanyi and Zhang Shuyi as well as the UK’s Gareth Jones, professor of biological sciences at the University of Bristol. The Ig Nobel Prize offers no prize money.
Tan, who holds a master’s degree in biology from the GEI, recently took a job as a middle school biology teacher in Guangxi. She traveled more than 20 hours by train to attend Sunday’s discussion.
