Seeing as the typical ErosBlog reader might have tired of my predilection for sex-mad cephalopods I’ve resolved to move back into my own phylum and provide for your enjoyment — bat fellatio.

And no, I’m not referring to someone’s mining-out the none-too-deeply-buried-to-begin-with subtext of the relationship between a certain costumed hero and his sidekick. No, I really mean actual bats. It seems that a group of Chinese scientists have been prying into the intimate habits of a little fruit bat Cynopterus sphinx that nests near their university campuses in Guangdong Province and, well, perhaps I’d best just let the abstract to their paper do the talking.

Female bats often lick their mate’s penis during dorsoventral copulation. The female lowers her head to lick the shaft or the base of the male’s penis but does not lick the glans penis which has already penetrated the vagina. Males never withdrew their penis when it was licked by the mating partner. A positive relationship exists between the length of time that the female licked the male’s penis during copulation and the duration of copulation. Furthermore, mating pairs spent significantly more time in copulation if the female licked her mate’s penis than if fellatio was absent. Males also show postcopulatory genital grooming after intromission. At present, we do not know why genital licking occurs, and we present four non-mutually exclusive hypotheses that may explain the function of fellatio in C. sphinx.

No jokes, please. This is science in action.

Our intrepid researchers even included a snippet of video of the bats going at it. I’m not sure whose idea it was to add porny music to the video. Maybe that’s also science in action.

Hat tip to Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True.