In the pond in front of my house, during the mating season of the pond cooters, turtle heads are regularly seen in threes or fours. Off and on, for as long as two or three days at a time I have watched groups of these heads with a spotting scope, and while I could see little of what the bearers of the heads were actually doing, it did not seem to involve any very violent strife. The three heads simply stayed together in a restricted patch of water for a day or more at a time, and there were occasional outbreaks of splashing and finally, the back of one of the turtles would come out of the water, indicating that mating was taking place.
A similar thing occurs among the green turtles at their nesting ground on the coast of Costa Rica. Here, too, the observations made have been only in snatches, and whatever subtleties of courtship behavior are carried out have not been seen. But during the early part of the nesting season the turtles mate out in front of the beach a few hundred yards beyond the surf line. For the first week or so of the mating time there are large numbers of courtship groups involving two males and one female. Among sea turtles, mating is a strenuous process. Attempts of the male to mount the back of the female involve a great deal of thrashing and splashing of water. Once the male attains the position on the upper shell of the female, however, he remains firmly anchored by two huge claws on his front flippers which grip the fore edges of her shell, and by a strong horn at the tip of his tail which curls up under the back edge of her shell. The only time male turtles are seen on shore at the nesting ground is when a copulating pair is caught by a breaker and thrown onto the beach.
The courtship of the alligator is noisy and exciting. The bull bellows and exudes musk from glands on the throat and at the sides of the cloaca. When the female approaches, the two of them race about in wild circles, making a big wake that rocks the reeds and sends the fishes flying. The frogs stop singing and the waterfowl scream.
Closely related to courtship is rivalry and combative behavior among males. This sort of strife is not generally disorderly and injurious, but actually may serve a variety of useful purposes. It keeps the race physically on its toes, as it were, weeding out the weaker individuals as breeders. It brings about a distribution of territory, and thus lends order to both the reproductive process and the daily life of the individual. It establishes hierarchies of dominance and submission, and these again contribute harmony by forestalling more harmful untrammeled fighting. And just a courtship does, the fighting may help instigate glandular cycles involved in the mating process.
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