Medicine: Tumult & Sex

A London biologist who tried to learn why birds lay more eggs if kept awake after dark reported last week in the current U. S. issue of Nature that noise and jostling as well as light are sex stimulants. If Professor William Rowan’s reasoning can be extended to human conduct it may provide a commentary on jamming in glaring, blaring night clubs, amusement parks, subways and country fairs. It may also explain why the filthy pigeons of Manhattan, London and Paris, and the noisy starlings of Washington are highly prolific.

Professor Rowan made his latest observations on trapped finches, whose cages he jostled for 7½ minutes daily, and on starlings which he caught with difficulty in London’s noisy West End. Commented the professor: “Collecting birds at night in the centre of London was more easily said than done.” In all cases the sex organs of those abnormally disturbed birds were larger and more fit for propagation than the sex organs of normal birds. The chain of physiological events which causes such sex stimulation is not altogether clear. In the case of light, it seems “that light falling upon the eye . . . stimulates the pituitary which in turn activates the gonads.” Besides influencing birds, light “has also been shown to be effective in certain mammals, reptiles, amphibians and fish.”