‘The crocodiles bellowed at the sky – then mated like mad’: the sex frenzy sparked by helicopters
Name: Crocodile mating.
Age: As old as crocodiles, presumably.
Appearance: As ABC news puts it, “The deed itself is not a particularly romantic procedure.”
Season: Mating times for crocodiles vary across the globe, but male arousal can often be triggered by a signal that the females’ optimal egg-laying time is approaching.
What sort of signal? Helicopters. What do you mean, helicopters? Chinooks, specifically.
The long ones with the rotors at either end? Exactly – they’re like Viagra for crocodiles.
Why would that be? No one is certain, but the passing of low-flying Chinooks overhead routinely drives the 3,000 residents of Koorana Crocodile Farm in Queensland, Australia, into an all-out sexual frenzy. “The crocodiles start vocalising to each other,” said the farm’s owner, John Lever.
Then what happens? “All of the big males got up and roared and bellowed at the sky,” said Lever. “And then after the helicopters left they mated like mad.”
How long has this been going on? At least since the Singapore armed forces began holding joint military exercises in the area.
So what is it about helicopters that crocodiles find so arousing? It could be that the males are reacting to what they think is thunder, heralding the wet season, which is ideal for mating.
I suppose that’s plausible. Or it could be that the helicopter noise resembles the low-frequency territorial call of bull crocs, prompting all the males to get down to business asap.
That also makes a certain amount of sense. It’s even possible that the choppers create a temporary drop in barometric pressure that fools the crocs into thinking a storm is coming.
However it works, it sounds like it really works. Indeed.
Do we know of any other animals that get excited by patrolling aircraft? No, but human-made noise can affect animal mating in many ways.
Give me an example of a sound that spoils the mood. Studies have shown that traffic noise interferes with a female Mediterranean field cricket’s ability to distinguish a superior male courtship song from a less good one.
I guess we’ve all made bad choices on that front. Scientists have also investigated whether the sound of new year’s fireworks disrupts the breeding habits of sea lions in Chile.
Have they tried helicopters on them? Because I’ve heard that can help. More study is certainly needed.
Do say: “I’m like a crocodile, baby – I get turned on by a big chopper.”
Don’t say: “Thank you, but can this not wait until we’ve landed safely?”
believe anything else,” said Courtney Johnson, a 28-year-old content creator from Austin, Texas. “It means showing up to life with radical optimism and joy.”
For Johnson, it felt a little delulu to believe that anyone would want to watch her TikTok videos, where she doles out career advice to her audience of over 130,000 followers.
“Instead of assuming no one would care, I went in with the delulu assumption that my work is important and that everyone is going to love it,” Johnson explained. “I ignored the mean comments and my low-performing posts, and instead focused solely on the positive comments. That fed into a positive, selffulfilling prophecy. Delusional? Maybe. Effective? Absolutely.”
The word has roots in the Kpop community, which first used it to describe a parasocial, obsessive fan. Though it’s been cutesified, the basic concept remains the same. Except now, instead of becoming an obsessed fan of an idol, you become an obsessed fan of yourself.
Bianca Bello, a 27-year-old New York TikToker, first learned the phrase from her 21-year-old intern, Cassie Fu Ren.
“Delulu just has a little more fun, a little more flavor, it’s a little more silly” than delusional, Ren explained in a video. “Delusional is rooted in almost like you’re losing your mind. Delulu is, like, I’m just being a silly little goofster.”
“It’s the idea of manifestation but simplified in terms that the everyday, non-witchy-archetype would understand,” Bello added in an interview. “It means to live unexpectedly and with the intent to create a world where you are that character narrating your own story.”
By that definition, anyone who’s confident in themselves would qualify as delulu. TikTokers say the trend is a self-aware, humorous way to fight against insecurities and societal pressure to conform.
Last week, Bello visited Forks, Washington, the Pacific north-west town that has become a tourism hub as the setting of the Twilight franchise.
“I fully thought I was embodying Bella Swan,” Bello said, name-checking the vampire novels’ main character, played by Kristen Stewart in the films.
“I genuinely envisioned Jacob Black coming out from behind a car or a tree or something and sweeping me off my feet … It was wholesome and healing.” In that moment, delulu meant romanticizing life, giving in to a fantasy, and indulging goofy, maybe childish, desires.
Delulu’s cousin, the delusion-ship, describes the dating habit of accelerating – or entirely making up – a relationship in one’s head. A crush holds eye contact for just a second longer than normal? They’re in love with you. A hookup texting you back three weeks later? They took so long because they didn’t want to bother you, and that was really considerate of them, actually. Ridiculous lines of thinking like these can be very reassuring.
There is no peer-reviewed research to back up the effectiveness of a delulu moment. It probably isn’t the best longterm life strategy. But experts say it can deliver a much-needed confidence boost. As the San Francisco therapist Alison McKleroy told Today, “Being delulu is almost like a self-efficacy tool. Being able to own your choices, take action and be fulfilled.”
For now – or until TikTok adopts a new psychology buzzword – delulu is the solulu, and it has its evangelists. “[It] makes me feel super strong in my ability to do anything I want,” Bello said. “It opened a portal for more positive and romanticized outlooks.”
– a treat, maybe. The strike that followed killed Nai’emah’s parents, paternal grandparents and siblings.
“I still don’t know what my grandfather wanted to give us. I dreamed of him yesterday, that he gave me a doll, but the doll was scary and I ran away,” Nai’emah said.
Aladini wants her granddaughter to have access to therapy, as she isn’t eating. “We will have to wait until the war ends, if we survive, to treat her,” she said.
Wafa Aludaini is a Gaza-based journalist and activist
away from fossil fuels. Swiss company Rabtherm is believed to have pioneered the idea, while German company Uhrig, which calls wastewater “a treasure beneath our feet” constructs 10 projects a year and expects soon – says the firm’s head of global business, Stephan von Bothmer – to scale to hundreds. In the Netherlands there are other projects – typically using sewage plants rather than raw sewage pipes – for a swimming pool in Urk and pilot projects in Rotterdam and Eindhoven.
“This is one of the pieces of the jigsaw in the energy transition,” says Harry de Brauw, energy transition adviser at Waternet. “We have calculated that you could heat 8% of Amsterdam with waste water systems: 10,000 homes.”
That said, you don’t want to take too much heat from sewage pipes. “You can’t reduce the temperature there too much because purification works with bacteria,” he adds. “It’s a biological process and if the bacteria get cold, they won’t work as hard and our water will be less well purified. But at the back end, where we release the purified water into surface water, we are happy for it to be colder. The most warmth potential is at the end of the sewage system.”
The critical challenge will lie in retrofitting existing infrastructure, which requires “a mindset” of can-do, access to sewer networks and probably some level of subsidy, says Von Bothmer.
Optimising houses is essential for this kind of domestic heating. Lisanne Havinga, assistant professor in building performance at Eindhoven University of Technology, says: “It’s probably the same in the UK that existing housing stock has a lot of draughts, which causes winter comfort problems and also makes people turn the heating a lot higher.”
She is working on the “Renovation
Explorer”, an open source project where homeowners will be able to get tailored recommendations. A sewerbased project – such as one that will soon heat her own home in another project fed by a sewage treatment plant – has advantages over air-based heat pumps, she says, because it won’t need as much boosting from an overloaded electricity net. The work is all part of the Dutch drive to leave fossil fuels behind – “van de gas af” as they put it – which will both make energy sources more sustainable and reduce carbon emissions. In 2019 the Dutch supreme court ruled that the Dutch government was doing too little to prevent climate change, and ordered it urgently to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
A final challenge with the sewer, points out another expert, is that it’s not just warm water down there. Paige Peters, founder of a sewage system to stop overflows during storms who spoke this week at the Aquatech Innovation Forum in Amsterdam, says: “With this idea of heat recovery, a big part of it is understanding how it could affect sewage infrastructure, the water flow in there, the temperature or the crazy things people put down sewers. We get rags, chicken bones … and a lot of carrots. Dealing with that infrastructure can be unpredictable.”
How much does this cost? €14m to go off the gas for 1,600 homes in north Amsterdam
Can other places do it too? Yes. Dutch sewers are pumped, because it is flat; the technique can be cheaper in gravity-driven systems and it’s easier with new-build.
Some helpful reading Lieven de Key Riothermie; Generating energy from waste water; Rotterdam Circulair