Be it a salmon swimming upstream or a turtle mounting a shoe, creatures obey the impulse that commands them to reproduce. But do they, at the end of the great energy expenditure, feel anything akin to what humans call an orgasm?
There's no clear list of animals that can orgasm. For one, research on physiological and neurological activity in animals during sexual behavior looks mostly at primates and rodents, David Puts, a professor of anthropology and psychology at Penn State, told Live Science in an email. And because animals can't describe their own experiences, we can't know for sure if they feel what humans feel during climax.
