MYRTLE BEACH, SC–This spring break, a record number of Fayetteville residents flocked to Myrtle Beach to commence their spring mating ritual.

“They’re a proud, fertile people,” said Dr. Garrett Walling, biologist and professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has dedicated his career to studying the mating habits of Fayetteville residents. “They are blissfully unaware of how essential their mating is to the proliferation of their species. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Walling and his team have studied the Fayetteville residents for years, documenting their reproductive habits and daily rituals. Dr. Jeremy Steinberg, a field biologist and ethnographer for the team, said the seasonal migratory mating remains a “bizarre phenomenon.”

“Primarily, we’ve seen courtship occur on the beach itself,” said Steinberg. “The males will burrow in the sand and construct massive sand-penises to attract the attention of potential mates. Females will abandon their neon or fishnet tank-tops, revealing their spongy underbellies to signify their fertility.”

“But this year there wast n’t enough space on the beach to sustain the usual courtship patterns,” he noted. “Some males converted to other methods, which we refer to as ‘off-beach activities’ or OBAs. This season, we’ve seen multiple males ask for mates ‘to come chill and pong back at the condo,’ a method usually reserved for much colder winter months.”

Walling’s team filmed hours of footage during their field expedition this spring break, adding to the already vast archive of Myrtle Beach spring break courtship video found on social media and old “Girls Gone Wild” VCR tapes.

“Unlike most organisms, Fayetteville residents engage in even more aggressive mating behavior when being filmed by researchers,” he said. “Strangely, the camera makes them more eager to expose reproductive organs and loudly give their mating calls, such as ‘WOOOO’ and ‘spring break 2014 bitches!'”

Steinberg went further in describing one of these filmed encounters.

“The male and female began mating at 4:30 p.m., ignoring a nearby group of other Fayetteville residents who were watching a UNC-Wilmington lacrosse game on television,” he said. “The sounds of the pair’s doughy, sunburnt bodies slapping against each other were as expected, but interestingly we saw that the male was still wearing his flat-brimmed hat, perhaps to further assert dominance in a season in which intrasex competition is so intense. Simply fascinating.”

Walling noted that the migratory nature of Fayetteville residents’ reproduction has created interesting adaptions in the past.

“We’ve long known that the male Fayetteville resident must avoid intimacy with potential mates. To achieve an erection, the male must know as little as possible about his partner and, ideally, neither party should know whether penetration has occurred,” he said. “We are still searching for an answer to why this must occur.”

Tagging individual residents by giving out free henna tattoos on the boardwalk, the team has found that similar adaptive behaviors may be occurring in Myrtle Beach nightclubs.

“We have seen many male Fayetteville residents don dark sunglasses to obscure physical flaws of potential partners, forcing them to rely on touch and smell alone. These males grope their way towards the most pungent combinations of tanning oil and Britney Spears perfume, key pheromones emitted by their potential female mates,” said undergraduate research assistant Keith Apperling. “These residents would do anything to avoid knowing they had sex with someone they will certainly see at the grocery store back in Fayetteville.”

In the unlikely event that the mating ritual fails, researchers said male Fayetteville residents have been known to stray from their migratory clusters and display aggressive behaviors.

“We have seen males do donuts in Piggly Wiggly parking lots, throw cinder blocks through windows, and, in their own terminology, ‘get in the face of some fucking dude and just punch him, fuck that kid, big douchebag fuck,'” Walling said.

The last time Myrtle Beach saw this large a number of mating Fayetteville residents was in 1994, when many of this season’s migrants were conceived.