curious about life

i had this pain today for about 2 hours: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelschmerz (Mittelschmerz = "middle pain")

i know my left ovary released an egg! i can't believe i know that (and which) one of my ovaries produced an egg this morning.

here's a rare sight of human ovulation

i'm a curious person and lately i've been actively learning about reproduction and fertility and what, how and why the heck my body does what it does every month. a documentary i watched said that we human females have concealed ovulation, as opposed to some other mammals like primates whose fertility period is advertised as in the case of female baboons and their red bottoms. our concealed ovulation means that there are few outwards signs signaling our fertility to the general population and it was theorized that this was evolutionarily developed as a way of deterring the "male philandering strategy because it deprives males of any reliable cue by which to judge whether a female is likely to have been impregnated"¹ and thus encouraging men to stick around and mate with their partner over long periods of time so as to increase their chances of fertilization. wow.

you know what else i learned? we instinctually choose our partner based on our sense of smell and our sense of smell is wired to be attracted to those with the most different immune system from our own thus giving our offspring the widest ranging immune system and thus the best chances of survival. this is so exciting! they did a smell test and sure enough the guy liked the smell of the t-shirt of the women who had the lowest commonality with his own immune system and he liked least the smells of the t-shirts worn by women who had immune systems closely matching his own.

¹ Women in Human Evolution By Lori D. Hager (http://books.google.com/books?id=WTsunMQqUogC&pg=PA156&lpg=PA156&dq=concealed+ovulation+increase+chances+of+fertilization&source=bl&ots=yQCZfY2hRU&sig=d68q9pDAfO7YB-1P3TgguGXg9eg&hl=en&ei=ZtPvScuVNoyKtAPTkOnUCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1)