Improbable research: the effect of mobile phones on rabbit sex

The effect of eletromagnetic waves emitted from mobile phones on rabbits' sex lives
Bunny rabbits
The research shows that mobile phones have a negative effect on the sex lives of rabbits. Photograph: GK Hart/Vikki Hart GK Hart/Vikki Hart/Public Domain

Lest anyone wonder why they studied the effect of mobile phones on rabbits' sex lives, Nader Salama, Tomoteru Kishimoto, Hiro-Omi Kanayama and Susumu Kagawa spelled out their reasons. Many scientists had tried (though for the most part failed) to prove that repeatedly holding a mobile phone against a person's head causes damage to the brain. The four scientists looked ahead to a perhaps different question: will holding a mobile phone near a man's testicles affect that man's sexual behaviour?

They devised an experiment. Given the expense, complexity and delicacy of doing it with humans, they opted instead for rabbits.

Salama, Kishimoto, Kanayama and Kagawa say, sweepingly, that they are the first to "have analysed the potential effect of exposure to electromagnetic waves emitted from mobile phones on male sexual behaviour". Details appear in their monograph called Effects of Exposure to a Mobile Phone on Sexual Behaviour in Adult Male Rabbit: An Observational Study, published in the International Journal of Impotence Research. The team performed this experiment at Tokushima School of Medicine in Japan.

They documented the ruttings (under admittedly artificial conditions) of six male rabbits that had switched-on phones near their genitals for 12 weeks, six that had switched-off phones, and another six that were phoneless.

The scientists noted the particulars of each mounting, and watched for the moment each rabbit went into "a state of sexual exhaustion". They report that the bunnies with active phones "got sexually exhausted earlier". This discovery, they emphasise, "might have some practical implications".

Research in urology and impotence these days often involves the interplay – sometimes delicate, sometimes not – of technology and biology.

The team knows this well. Three years earlier, they published a report with the mostly-self-explanatory title Unusual Trivial Trauma May End With Extrusion of a Well-Functioning Penile Prosthesis: A Case Report. It presents not one, but two instructive cases.

The first concerns a 57-year-old man who "claimed the prosthesis had been functioning well, giving him and his two wives, as he had a polygamous marriage, an excellent degrees [sic] of satisfaction".

The problem was that: "He also reported having bumped his penis into the suitcase of the preceding passenger while boarding an airplane five days prior to presentation."

The second patient was a 64-year-old man who "described having trapped his penis against a toilet seat while sitting down to defecate four days earlier".

The doctors removed the device from each sufferer. They matter-of-factly report that "recovery was uneventful in both cases".

The doctors remark: "These prostheses [which are 13 millimeters in diameter] are somewhat bulky and cannot be satisfactorily crammed into relatively small organs. This crowding quite possibly invites "easier exposure of patient organs to unexpected trauma".

The big lesson, says the report, is: "When the implantation of a malleable penile prosthesis is considered, appropriate sizing should be taken into account."

We will now see if, prosthesis-less and left to their own devices, these men, like rabbits, breed.

(Thanks to Jan Wooten for bringing this to my attention.)
