Valentine's an animal attraction

The queen of the naked mole rats has it made.

She doesn't have to worry about not having a Valentine. She gets to pick one out of several males.

Albuquerque Biopark celebrated its second annual Valentine's Day event Saturday with education stations set up around the zoo, aquarium and botanic gardens. Tour guides discussed the mating rituals of everything from koala bears to sharks.

Zoo education coordinator Alyson Wallace said the event is an interesting way to learn how animals go about getting and keeping a mate.

Also, she said, the zoo is a romantic location for Valentine's Day.

"This is a pretty popular place for a date," she said.

This year couples could purchase a ride in a horse-drawn buckboard carriage for $2 or sample strawberries and apple cider.

The rain put a damper on the event, but guides were still available to talk about love stories of the animals living in the zoo.

The naked mole rats, originally from Africa, live in complex underground tunnel societies spanning the size of football fields. The dominant female, or queen, has her pick of the males and is the only one who can get pregnant.

The queen at the zoo is ready to pop, and because she has no hair, viewers might glimpse the little babies moving around inside her.

Guide Cheryl Riggs said she isn't sure why the queen is the only fertile female.

"We think the queen's urine in the toilet chamber has pheromones that suppress the fertility of the other females," she said.

She said if you separate a female naked mole rat from the queen, she will become fertile.

Wallace said zoo workers almost act as a dating service to the endangered animals.

"There's a lengthy introduction phase," she said.

Workers will inch the animals closer and closer to test the water, she said.

And when a connection is made, it's pretty obvious.

For instance, when a giraffe is ready to breed, its odor becomes musky.

"The smell is something else," Wallace said.

At the aquarium, aquarist Josh Davis said the parrotfish change their sex to fit the situation.

"The alpha female undergoes changes and turns into the dominant male," he said.

He said their society does this to keep the population balanced.

Davis said stingrays are violent in their mating rituals.

He pointed out females with chewed up fins.

"What's striking about their mating ritual is that it's pretty aggressive," he said. "The males bite down on the females."

Over time, the females develop thicker skin to prepare for mating, he said.

Guide Maleta Van Loan said the aquarium had a female sandbar shark die, and they think it was because unwanted suitors were harassing her.

"When she died, she had tremendous amounts of lactic acid inside her," she said.

Van Loan said it was caused by the stress she had built up while trying to escape the males.

She said black tip sharks are dying at rapid rates because humans use the chemicals in their fins as an aphrodisiac.

"They only use the fins, and then they throw the rest back," she said. "The fish dies and drowns."

She said she sees couples on dates at the aquarium all the time. The dim lights and the exotic tropical fish provide a dating alternative, she said.

"It's something different than going to a movie or a bar," she said. "You can come here during the day."

She said once an aquarist helped a man propose to his girlfriend by swimming in the giant tank and holding up signs asking her to marry him.

"It was cool," she said. "Everyone clapped."