Sporting Balls to Bollocks: A Revelation

You know some jokes just refuse to die? Sometime around 2011, what started as a genuinely silly idea for my desk display has basically taken on a life of its own. What is it, you ask?. I started collecting different balls. And I don't mean the fancy-dress kind. We’re talking the sport kind – all shapes, all sizes, all uses.

The plan back then was to have on my desk, a rotating gallery of spherical glory: Cricket balls (red, white, cork, synthetic polymer, even an MRI one – don't ask), a field hockey synthetic number, Table Tennis, Golf, Squash, Billiards. You get the picture, right? Even managed to snag an old leather hockey ball and miniature football and volleyball replicas. The whole idea was to swap them out weekly, so when some unsuspecting colleague inevitably asked, "Why on earth do you have that?", my perfectly straight-faced answer would be: "Oh, you know. I have balls." A little tongue-in-cheek, perhaps. A lot, actually.

And Then Things Got... Scientific.

Fast forward to a week ago, and that gloriously juvenile punchline came screaming back to me. Why? Because I was reading this utterly fascinating (and slightly unsettling) article about actual bollocks and their varying sizes. Seriously. My brain latched onto the "I have balls" part, and suddenly, my metaphorical collection met some very real, biological ones.

Apparently, male mammals have widely different sizes depending on how, shall we say, promiscuous they are. Turns out, human balls are actually on the daintier side compared to some of our primate cousins. Which, honestly, is quite telling. Bigger brain, smaller balls. Interesting trade-off, that. The macaques, for example, apparently win the primate tree's biggest-balls-to-body-ratio award, and their behaviour certainly seems to back that up. They're basically the casanovas of the primate world.

A deeper dive across the entire mammalian family tree pretty consistently shows a pattern: larger balls, smaller brains for the more... enthusiastic species. The exception that proves the rule, though? Dolphins. Big brains, and balls that average a whopping 4% of their body weight. Talk about having it all.

My joke display of sporting spheres somehow led me down a rabbit hole of evolutionary biology and mammalian promiscuity. What bizarre connections have you stumbled upon lately?

C