New book explores how males in the animal kingdom are often outsmarted by ‘murderous’ females

Made famous by poet Rudyard Kipling and, later, a nineties’ pop tune – the idea that ‘the female of the species is more deadlier than the male’ certainly rings true in a new book about the animal kingdom.

Bestseller B**** , by zoologist and broadcaster Lucy Cooke, explores how female animals are ruthless, murderous and often deadly. 

These include the female ringtail lemurs of Madagascar, who bully males out of the best sunbathing spots, to meerkat mothers of the Kalahari Desert who murder any female in sight. 

Zoologist Lucy Cooke (pictured) is author of the book B****, which explores who ruthless and murderous female animals can be 

Author Lucy, who has presented prime time series for BBC, ITV and National Geographic, said: ‘Sexist myths have led the lives of female creatures being overlooked for centuries. 

‘But this book overturns outdated binary expectations of bodies, brains, biology and behaviour and shows how dominant and aggressive females can be.’

Here, Femail brings you the best of the deadliest female creatures from around the world. 

Female ringtail lemurs are known to be aggressive and dominant – and are known to knock males off the best sunbathing spots 

RINGTAIL LEMUR

The movie Madagascar may have portrayed King Julian as he ruler of the ring-tailed lemurs, but in real life a king is nowhere to be found. 

Male ring-tailed lemurs are smaller and socially inferior, with the females aggressively dominant. 

Lucy said: ‘If a male has food or a sunbathing spot that the females want then they will whack the male and take what they want. No retaliation. Males are said to be frightened of females. And it is females who do all the territorial scent marking and patrolling – the kinds of behaviours normally associated with males.’ 

Female topi Antelope who live on the Masai Mara are known to fight and lock horns over a male mate

TOPI ANTELOPE 

While people may think that only male antelope fight with horns, this is not the case with topi antelopes. On the Masai Mara, during the short rains of February, females regularly lock horns – over the top bull’s limited prize sperm.

Breeding season is intense as the females all come into oestrus for just one day of the year. This short fertility window leads to a twenty-four-hour frenzy of sexual activity as each female mates with four to twelve males. 

Some pushy cows even go so far as to charge top studs in the act of mounting other females. This brazen tactic doesn’t always pay off. Disrupted males will often counter-attack belligerent females and rebuff their advances with added aggression, especially if they’ve mated with them already.

Lucy said: ‘Charles Darwin never envisaged female competition as significant as it is for males. But it turns out that it is. Although it might be less overt and dramatic than duelling males, females compete just as viciously over resources required for reproduction as males do over mates.’ 

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The female spotted hyena will laugh in your face if you call her submissive – and then bite your face off 

SPOTTED HYENA 

Charles Darwin may have branded the female of the species as passive, coy and submissive. But try explaining this to a dominant female spotted hyena. She will laugh in your face – after she has bitten it off. 

The animal is known for her eight-inch clitoris that is shaped and positioned exactly like the male’s penis and she also gets erections. But the female’s sexual transgressions don’t stop at her genitals.  

Females can be up to 10 per cent heavier than males in the wild – and 20 per cent in captivity. 

Female spotted hyenas are also more aggressive than males. These highly intelligent, social carnivores live in clans that follow a female lineage and are run by an alpha female. 

Males are actually the lowest rung of hyena society and submissive outcasts begging for acceptance, food and sex. Females are considered dominant in most situations, engage in rough play and vigorous scent-marking as well as leading the territorial defence – all behaviours more commonly associated with the opposite sex. 

Naked mole rats have one queen who lives far longer than the rest of the colony and is the only one who breeds. She’s also a bully 

NAKED MOLE RAT 

Mole rats are the only mammal that live like social insects, termites in particular. Each colony is ruled by a single breeding queen capable of pumping out dozens of babies several times a year. She lives far longer than the rest of the colony and has no age-related decline in her fertility, allowing her to leave an extraordinary genetic legacy during her life.

Other than the queen’s chosen mate, the rest of the colony’s job is to support her in her baby-making mission. Bigger mole rats take on the soldier’s role of defence, while the smaller ones act as workers and spend their days digging for edible tubers, sweeping the tunnels with bristly little back legs, tending to babies or cleaning the toilet chamber.

Some 99.99 per cent of the colony will never reproduce. They can’t. Both male and female subordinates remain trapped in a pre-pubescent state and don’t even develop adult genitalia.

Lucy said: ‘The queen keeps her subordinates imprisoned in their sexless state by low-level physical bullying. She is constantly patrolling her colony and giving her workers aggressive shoves that show she’s a strong leader. 

‘Her relentless royal tour, and the stress it creates, is what maintains the colony’s sexual suppression. If the queen stops, or becomes weak, then it all get very Game of Thrones. The other females become sexually mature, and they’ll fight to the death for the top spot.’

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Meerkats look cute and cuddly but the females are vicious and violent, typically murdering their own children and sisters

MEERKATS  

Although these animals are small, social and comic, looks can be deceiving. In fact, a scientific study has unmasked the meerkat as the most homicidal of more than 1,000 mammals. One in five will be violently murdered by a fellow meerkat, typically their own mother, sister or auntie. 

This is down to ruthless reproductive competition between closely related females. The matriarch of the group wants other female relatives to not reproduce during her reign and instead raise her own pups. As such, she monopolises 80 per cent of the breeding and will use extortion and murder to achieve this end.

When a matriarch dies, the top job falls to the oldest and heaviest female in the group. From the moment she inherits her status the new alpha’s size increases, her testosterone levels rise and her hostility towards other females surges. She especially turns on those closest in age and size, namely her sisters and later her daughters. The matriarch will competitively eat to retain her bulky authority and any females that get uncomfortably close to her supreme size will be evicted.

In the event that another female does dare to give birth, the matriarch will kill her pups – often her own grandchildren – and banish the female, which is essentially a death sentence in the Kalahari. If they’re lucky, evictees may be permitted back on one condition: they wet-nurse their murderous mother’s babies.

Zoologist Lucy Cooke banding together with banded mongoose. The creatures are known to be highly territorial 

BANDED MONGOOSE 

Banded mongooses are cute gregarious cousins of the meerkat that live in female- dominated family clans. But they are highly territorial and turf wars are frequent and bloody.  

Around three times a month, a mongoose rabble will clash violently with their neighbours, with death and fatal injuries being common. 

Such warmongering behaviour is generally considered the preserve of males. But in the case of the banded mongoose it turns out the females are the instigators, and it’s all about sex.

Lucy said: ‘Researchers have discovered that females start fights with rival gangs so they can sneak off in the ensuing chaos to have sex with their males. 

‘This brings fresh genetic blood into the group, but comes at a price to the males who bear the cost of these violent skirmishes.’

Male scientists failed the realise that the female pinyon jays were much more dominant than the males for decades 

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PINYON JAY 

For a long time, some male scientists have approached the animal kingdom with pre-set views of male dominance. This was clearly demonstrated with those studying the Pinyon Jay or Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus.

For twenty years, ornithologists John Marzluff and Russell Balda researched these cobalt-blue members of the crow family live in noisy flocks in North America.

Hoping to find an ‘alpha male’ they instead found that the male birds were committed pacifists with no macho behaviour except for sly sidewise glances. Still, they felt confident in stating, ‘There is little doubt that adult males are in aggressive control’. 

The researchers ignored a whole host of ‘aggressive behaviour’ –  dramatic airborne battles, vigorous flapping and forceful pecking – as this was all done by females. The authors concluded that this ‘testy’ feminine behaviour must be hormonally driven – the bird equivalent to PMT. 

What in fact is true is that pinyon jay’s have a complex social system.

Lucy said: ‘The clues that females are in fact highly competitive and play an instrumental role in the jay’s hierarchy are all there in their meticulously recorded data, but they were blind to them. 

‘Instead they pushed forward dogmatically in search of the crowning of a new king, a coronation of their conviction which, of course, never happened.’

The females wait in the middle of their web for a mate, before devouring them before, after or during sex

DARWIN’S BARK SPIDER 

It is commonly known in the spider world that seduction can lead to a dance with death – and this is never more the case than with Darwin’s bark spider (Caerostris darwini). 

The female is around 14 times the weight of the male. To seduce her, the male must gingerly traverse her enormous web – a succession of tripwires designed to sense the slightest vibration – and copulate, all without triggering her attacking instinct.

The female spider is not averse to catching and eating her sexual suitors before, during or after sex. Studies have shown that cannibalism provides the female with superior sustenance, as the nutrients derived from the male are effectively tailor-made for making baby spiders. Sexual cannibalism is thus the ultimate act of paternal care, as long as the munched male is actually the father.

Compared to the males, females also have the longest fangs and most potent venom. They also live longer and grow larger in order to nourish as many eggs as possible.

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