This post was taken from the Guardian.

Isabella Rossellini’s guide to the sex life of the anchovy (and the duck, the snail, the dolphin…)

In a series of short films, Isabella Rossellini acts as a range of animals having sex. She just wants to amuse us, she says – and teach us some hard science about the birds and the bees

Against the odds, Isabella Rossellini transforms into a migrating salmon with nothing more than goggles, a body-stocking and an elaborate paper hat, and waits for a worthy mate to notice her. He arrives in primary colours, dangling jauntily from a string, and quickly wins her heart. “Here are my eggs,” the daughter of Hollywood legend Ingrid Bergman cries to the quivering puppet. “Spray them with your sperm!”

Welcome to the quirky world of Seduce Me, the latest series of disarming short films from the 58-year-old actress, model and ex-wife of Martin Scorsese best known for Blue Velvet, Fearless and Death Becomes Her. The films, produced by Robert Redford’s Sundance Channel, are written and co-directed by Rossellini, who takes three minutes or less to portray the bizarre seduction rituals of animals around us, with help from paper puppets, foam film sets and often unflattering costumes that never fall short of heroic. The films are described as “the spawn of Green Porno” referring to Rossellini’s Webby award-winning previous series of equally outlandish shorts exploring the sexual proclivities of bees, barnacles and other creatures.

Next week, seven of Rossellini’s films go on show at the Natural History Museum, as part of a major exhibition called Sexual Nature. The museum decided to host the films because, amusement value aside, they are scientifically accurate: snails jab each other with painful darts before sex and female ducks have versatile vaginas. “The films turned out to be a wonderful experiment,” says Rossellini. “We certainly didn’t expect them to end up at the Natural History Museum in London.”

As the museum boasts: “You’ll be amazed at what nature gets up to.”