Hot Fun in the Summer Time

It was a nasty winter this year in northern Illinois, with Snowmageddon hitting us hard in early February. As I shoveled out the driveway, I was sure we would have snow until July. Amazingly, it all melted within a few weeks. The rest of the winter was easier but it is still a shock to finally have warm weather. That and the fact that I just finished my first semester of grad school puts me in a better mood. One of my co-workers asked me if I was going to go woman hunting now that I have free time. "It's breeding season," he said with a smirk.

I've never heard of spring being called breeding season, but its an interesting idea. (I would have thought of college as breeding season.) I forgot about the comment, until I saw a video from HotforWords on YouTube. (I mentioned Miss Marina Orlova in the October 13, 2010, post "Big Boobs and Bigger IQs.") She explains the background of the term "spring fever" and says it came to mean a sexual awakening in the spring months.

Ok, now I was curious. So I found this article from The Times that explains how greater concentrations of sunlight change hormone levels, causing people in the upper half of the northern hemisphere to feel more energetic and sexual in the spring. The retina, the part of the eye connected to the brain by the brain stem, has reactions to the differing amounts of sunlight, which causes hormonal changes. Melatonin is especially vulnerable to changes in sunlight. This hormone regulates sleep patterns, and the more sunlight, the less melatonin is made.

People have less sex in the winter, and that leads to a build up of sperm, says Michael Smolenski, a professor of chronobiology at the University of Texas. “In sexually active males, sperm count is affected by two factors, environmental temperature and sexual activity. When men are sexually active, sperm count goes down; when they’re not sexually active, they’re not using it, so it goes up," he says. He says this may explain why there are more unplanned pregnancies in the spring than the rest of the year.

He also says that conception rates are high in the late summer and early fall, due to men's testosterone levels being the highest.

Blogger Musings:
Ok, let's say pregnancy rates do increase in the late summer, say August. If a woman gets pregnant in August, she will give birth in May. In May its warm and food is becoming more plentiful. The parents will have more food and the baby will be less likely to freeze to death, as it wasn't born in the cold months.