Now _THAT'S_ a rape-able duck!
And now, a special-request report...
In Ducks, War of the Sexes Plays Out in the Evolution of Genitalia
DATELINE LITCHFIELD - Dr. Patricia Brennan, a Connecticut behavioral ecologist and post-doctoral researcher at Yale University and the University of Sheffield, visits the Livingston Ripley Waterfowl Sanctuary every two weeks to coax out and measure the phalluses of six species of ducks. One can only assume she's calling her mallard-phallus-squeezing studies "Project Duck Dick Goose."
When she first visited in January, the duck-dicks were the size of rice grains and not exactly the kind of rice a duck-bride wants thrown around on her duck-wedding night. Now, however, many of them are growing rapidly. But hey, my grain of rice doubled when I saw Dr. Patricia Brennan's picture myself.
Some ducks grow phalluses as long as their entire body. In the fall, the genitalia will disappear, only to reappear next spring. And the champion phallus from one Meller’s duck is a long, spiraling tentacle. Detachable foot-long mallard tentacle-penises? All in all, unnamed sources say, they're pretty sure they saw this anime.
The anatomy of ducks is especially bizarre considering that 97 percent of all bird species have no phallus at all. Most male birds just deliver their sperm through an opening, or --in ornithology parlance-- through a wrengina. Dr. Brennan is investigating how this sexual wonder of the world came to be.
Part of the answer, she has discovered, has gone overlooked for decades. Male ducks may have such extreme genitals because the females do too. The birds are locked in an evolutionary struggle for reproductive success, building bigger and bigger genitals to match or outdo their partners, a third-arms race, if you will.
Dr. Brennan was oblivious to bird phalluses until 1999. Then while working in a Costa Rican forest, she observed a pair of birds called tinamous mating. "They became unattached, and I saw this huge thing hanging off of him," she said. "I could not believe it. It became one of those questions I wrote down: why do these males have this huge phallus?" In the margin of that same page, unnamed sources say, is a crossed-out doodle of a anatomically-correct Donald and Daisy getting it on. Dr. Brennan: hhhhkinda creepy.
A bird phallus is similar - but not identical - to a mammalian penis. Most of the time it remains invisible, curled up inside a bird’s body. Which, if unnamed sources' ex-girlfriends are to be believed, is one of the ways they're similar. During mating, however, the duck-dick fills with lymphatic fluid and expands into a long, corkscrew shape. The bird’s sperm travels on the outside of the phallus, along a spiral-shaped groove, into the female bird, who, one supposes in response, spins on the top from the rotational pressure.
To learn about this peculiar organ, Dr. Brennan decided she would have to make careful dissections of male ducks from a local farm. Gazing at the enormous organs, she asked herself a question that apparently no one had asked before.
...No, not that one
...No not that either
...Ewww! Oh, come on now!
She asked, "So what does the female look like?" She continued, "Obviously you can’t have something like that without some place to put it in. You need a garage to park the car." Okay, so you guys were right on your second guess.
The equivalent of the vagina in birds, called the lower oviduct (heh heh: ova duck), is typically a simple tube. But when Dr. Brennan dissected some female ducks, she discovered they had a radically different anatomy. "There were all these weird structures, these pockets and spirals," she said. Unnamed sources in fact likened these quackginas to what you get when MC Escher meets Georgia O'Keeffe, only a lot less confusing and slightly less sexual.
Somehow, generations of biologists had never noticed this anatomy before. Perhaps, she thought, the two sexes were coevolving, with elaborate quackginas driving the evolution of long duck-dicks.
To test this idea, Dr. Brennan traveled to Alaska where she caught, dissected, and compared the male and female anatomy of 16 species of ducks and geese. In order to keep her studies distinct in her mind, therefore, she called this one "Project Goose-Dick Duck-Dick Goose"
She found that if a male bird had a long duck-dick, the female tended to have a more elaborate quackgina. And if the male had a small goose-dick, the female tended to have a simple honkgina. Dr. Brennan said, "The correlation was incredibly tight."
...Heh. I'll bet it was.
Dr. Seth McCracken, who discovered the longest known bird phallus on an Argentine duck in 2001, is struck by the fact that it was a woman who discovered the complexity of female birds. "Maybe it's the male bias we all have," he said. "It's just been out there, waiting to be discovered." Unnamed sources say he continued, "I mean, I love women. There's no reason I should be so obsessed with bird phalluses. I dunno, I guess bird cooch just isn't as exciting as mammalian cooch. And plus, with bird phalluses you can sorta wrap 'em around your finger like a bendy straw!"
Dr. Brennan suspects that when the females of a species evolved better defenses, they drove the evolution of male phalluses. "The males have to step up to produce a longer or more flexible phallus," she said. To test her hypothesis, Dr. Brennan plans to team up with a biomechanics expert to build a transparent model of a female duck. She says she wants to see exactly what a duck phallus does during mating.
...Heh. I'll bet she does.
.
In Ducks, War of the Sexes Plays Out in the Evolution of Genitalia
DATELINE LITCHFIELD - Dr. Patricia Brennan, a Connecticut behavioral ecologist and post-doctoral researcher at Yale University and the University of Sheffield, visits the Livingston Ripley Waterfowl Sanctuary every two weeks to coax out and measure the phalluses of six species of ducks. One can only assume she's calling her mallard-phallus-squeezing studies "Project Duck Dick Goose."
When she first visited in January, the duck-dicks were the size of rice grains and not exactly the kind of rice a duck-bride wants thrown around on her duck-wedding night. Now, however, many of them are growing rapidly. But hey, my grain of rice doubled when I saw Dr. Patricia Brennan's picture myself.
Some ducks grow phalluses as long as their entire body. In the fall, the genitalia will disappear, only to reappear next spring. And the champion phallus from one Meller’s duck is a long, spiraling tentacle. Detachable foot-long mallard tentacle-penises? All in all, unnamed sources say, they're pretty sure they saw this anime.
The anatomy of ducks is especially bizarre considering that 97 percent of all bird species have no phallus at all. Most male birds just deliver their sperm through an opening, or --in ornithology parlance-- through a wrengina. Dr. Brennan is investigating how this sexual wonder of the world came to be.
Part of the answer, she has discovered, has gone overlooked for decades. Male ducks may have such extreme genitals because the females do too. The birds are locked in an evolutionary struggle for reproductive success, building bigger and bigger genitals to match or outdo their partners, a third-arms race, if you will.
Dr. Brennan was oblivious to bird phalluses until 1999. Then while working in a Costa Rican forest, she observed a pair of birds called tinamous mating. "They became unattached, and I saw this huge thing hanging off of him," she said. "I could not believe it. It became one of those questions I wrote down: why do these males have this huge phallus?" In the margin of that same page, unnamed sources say, is a crossed-out doodle of a anatomically-correct Donald and Daisy getting it on. Dr. Brennan: hhhhkinda creepy.
A bird phallus is similar - but not identical - to a mammalian penis. Most of the time it remains invisible, curled up inside a bird’s body. Which, if unnamed sources' ex-girlfriends are to be believed, is one of the ways they're similar. During mating, however, the duck-dick fills with lymphatic fluid and expands into a long, corkscrew shape. The bird’s sperm travels on the outside of the phallus, along a spiral-shaped groove, into the female bird, who, one supposes in response, spins on the top from the rotational pressure.
To learn about this peculiar organ, Dr. Brennan decided she would have to make careful dissections of male ducks from a local farm. Gazing at the enormous organs, she asked herself a question that apparently no one had asked before.
...No, not that one
...No not that either
...Ewww! Oh, come on now!
She asked, "So what does the female look like?" She continued, "Obviously you can’t have something like that without some place to put it in. You need a garage to park the car." Okay, so you guys were right on your second guess.
The equivalent of the vagina in birds, called the lower oviduct (heh heh: ova duck), is typically a simple tube. But when Dr. Brennan dissected some female ducks, she discovered they had a radically different anatomy. "There were all these weird structures, these pockets and spirals," she said. Unnamed sources in fact likened these quackginas to what you get when MC Escher meets Georgia O'Keeffe, only a lot less confusing and slightly less sexual.
Somehow, generations of biologists had never noticed this anatomy before. Perhaps, she thought, the two sexes were coevolving, with elaborate quackginas driving the evolution of long duck-dicks.
To test this idea, Dr. Brennan traveled to Alaska where she caught, dissected, and compared the male and female anatomy of 16 species of ducks and geese. In order to keep her studies distinct in her mind, therefore, she called this one "Project Goose-Dick Duck-Dick Goose"
She found that if a male bird had a long duck-dick, the female tended to have a more elaborate quackgina. And if the male had a small goose-dick, the female tended to have a simple honkgina. Dr. Brennan said, "The correlation was incredibly tight."
...Heh. I'll bet it was.
Dr. Seth McCracken, who discovered the longest known bird phallus on an Argentine duck in 2001, is struck by the fact that it was a woman who discovered the complexity of female birds. "Maybe it's the male bias we all have," he said. "It's just been out there, waiting to be discovered." Unnamed sources say he continued, "I mean, I love women. There's no reason I should be so obsessed with bird phalluses. I dunno, I guess bird cooch just isn't as exciting as mammalian cooch. And plus, with bird phalluses you can sorta wrap 'em around your finger like a bendy straw!"
Dr. Brennan suspects that when the females of a species evolved better defenses, they drove the evolution of male phalluses. "The males have to step up to produce a longer or more flexible phallus," she said. To test her hypothesis, Dr. Brennan plans to team up with a biomechanics expert to build a transparent model of a female duck. She says she wants to see exactly what a duck phallus does during mating.
...Heh. I'll bet she does.
.