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First a male will grab onto a female to start mating, but then another male will grab on and try to pull that first male off. Soon a female has a large ball of males holding her down, pressing her underwater until she drowns.
    After the carnage is complete, animals go their separate ways, leaving several dead females lying in the pond among the fertilized eggs. At that point, a sneaker male will grab a dead female, cuddle her as he would if she were alive, and begin mating with her dead body. While he’s committing this act of necrophilia, he squeezes the sides of her body, causing eggs to come out into the water one after another, like slimy pearls on a mucus necklace. Other males will sometimes approach and try to pull him off, so that first male might end up pushing her dead body around the pond, to fertilize all the eggs himself.
    Incredibly, this works. Necrophiliac sneaker male Rhinella pass on their DNA. Males have been observed having sex with dead females in many other animal groups, including penguins, ducks, and lobsters, but Rhinella is the only animal for which necrophilia can actually lead to offspring.
    To me, this story is an especially good reminder that natureisn’t a model for what humans should do. Somewhere in a mountain pond in Spain, a male frog is squeezing eggs out of a female that was killed by gangs of aggressive, copulating males. Next time someone uses nature as a justification for any decision they’ve made, like what a woman’s role should be in the home, perhaps, just ask them how Rhinella fits into their nature-inspired world.
    In those instances where sneaker males mate with living females, the sex has to happen relatively quickly, or else the dominant male will have time to come over and beat the sneaker up. Marine iguanas, found only on the Galápagos Islands, are another species in which sneaker males operate, and they’ve found a handy way to speed things up. 20
    Female marine iguanas will mate only over a few short weeks each year, and the fierce competition among males has large males defending large territories then, for access to females. You might not know that a male marine iguana needs about three minutes of sex to achieve orgasm (though that’s a great conversation starter at parties, in my experience; you’re welcome). For a large male, that’s no issue, but smaller, sneaker males don’t have that kind of time. Anytime a sneaker male manages to have sex with a female, there’s a very good chance the dominant male will come break things up before he can transfer his sperm, thus making his sneaker strategy useless.
    Here’s how sneaker male marine iguanas deal with that problem. When a sneaker male sees a female walking by, he gets into a sex position, with a bent body and tail, just as he would if he were having sex with her. This apparently is how iguanas masturbate, because it causes a few drops of semen to come out of his penis. That semen dries on the tip of his penis, andwhen he eventually does have sex, that old semen gets deposited inside the female. He’ll get even more sperm inside her if he manages to stay on top of her for the full three minutes required to have an orgasm, but just in case he gets pushed away by the dominant male before that happens, some of the dried semen he produced during masturbation will be left inside her. And that’s better than nothing.
    Even teeny-tiny animals use sneaker male strategies. If you ever go snorkeling on a moonless night in the Caribbean, you may luck into seeing blue pulses of light shooting up through the water in complex patterns from the sea grass below. I’ve never seen this myself, but it’s on my life list to see someday. Big-time.
    Those light pulses come from special light-producing organs on shrimplike creatures called ostracods. 21 The males are tiny, less than two millimeters long, and they make those light displays to attract females. Over the course of about twelve seconds, a male flashes ten to twenty