Why are dolphines hyper-sexed?

Answer 1

I am not exactly sure where you got the information that dolphins are "hyper-sexed," but I fear that this trait you ask about just doesn't make much sense. Perhaps you can think about it this way: sex is not always only for reproduction. Now, from a human experience like ours, that is obvious. We have sex not only for procreation, even if some want to insist we should and thereby reduce us to a particular type of animal sexuality. Go figure... At any rate, the reason for us not only to have sex is not simply because we can, or because we have no reproductive season due to our ability to get food all year round (although that certainly has some modulating role to play), but primarily because we are social animals.

Living in social groups is a challenge for every individual. It requires numerous cognitive abilities, such as the ability to recognize those individuals that belong to your group, read their behavior properly, know what makes them tick and what ticks them off. Without such abilities, aggression would soon take over and the social community would break down. For social animals, like ourselves or dolphins, being able to disapate tension in a productive way is truly important.

Such special demands have given brain evolution in a certain trajectory. Brains of social critters are extremely well attuned to living in groups and to solve the particular issues that arise between individuals of the group. For example, who leads the group, and how are the individuals lower in the hierarchy deal with their position. In apes, lower ranking males often form coallitions against the alpha male and aid one another in taking over the group. The point here is, social life requires very complex social behaviors. (In a recent paper in Science or Nature, researchers report empathetic behavior in rats for cage mates. The mere thought of such "primitive" critters to have such complex, elaborate social sentiments is something only a few years back would have been equaled to scientific nonesense...)

What does all this have to do with sex? Well, sex is indeed in many ways a particular form of social behavior, one that actually many animals display at times in their lives. But while in most non-social animals, sex is a rather mechanistic act, in social animals it can take on a plethora of new functions. For example, in our close cousins, the Bonobos, sex is a way to resolve conflict. Bonobos use sex to resolve fights with one another, to coax others into helping out with things, to assure the bond between partners or group members. Perhaps, hyper-sexed may work here; but keep in mind that the prefix hyper requires a standard, and that would be hard to define.

In dolphins, like other group animals, sex can aid the bond between individuals of the group and thereby help keep group dynamics functional. In humans sex between partners is neither always for procreation nor recreation, but largely for strengthening the bond between partners. A relationship without sex quickly results in psychological problems, most often probably of the nature that one of the two partners would feel rejected and not appreciated or loved anymore. In dolphins such reasoning would perhaps not work, but the fact that the complexity of the group requires so much more than a wham-bam-thank-you-mam, just like in case of humans, explains why sex is so very different for these animals than say for sharls or slugs. The complexity of sexual behavior here is very much a function of the social requirements.

To be sure, other animals can have very complex sexual behaviors as well, even if they are not social. But the complexity I am pointing at here is that of the interpersonal interaction of two individuals. Experiments suggest that dolphins can recognize their own mirror image, and also the way they use their communication further suggests that dolphins have not only self-awareness, but self-consciousness. Just like great apes, their cognitive abilities are not like ours, but that doesn't mean they are not self-conscious. The man-animal divide is far less distinct and more gradual than we thought some twenty years ago.

As self-conscious animals, dolphins certainly engage a sexual act differently from say a shark or a teleost fish. Their cognitive ability to have a concept of themselves is, as I indicated above, a function of their social lifestyle. And so also their sexuality is a result of the evolution of social group life.

One final note, keep in mind that sex is not simply a matter of the penis and the vagina... Sexuality is the domain of the brain, and so you have to consider the brain in the context of the life hisotry of a species to answer your question. I hope this helps, but I would suggest you would not call dolphins hypersexual, since they really aren't.

I hope this helps.

Answer 2

No, they use sex as a part of their recreational skills. They, humans and bonobos are three well known species that use sex for reasons other than reproduction.
Sex in this species is a very common way to establish links that trespass intimacy and help on the form and function of a community

Answer 3

Dolphins seem to know where the fun is. They play games when they're not hunting fish. In a way, they seem more enlightened than humans.