holy bat-fellatio, Batman!

[memegarden]

Some one of my LJ friends recently posted about bat penises. Summary: they are Large. In further bat penis news, fruit bats commonly engage in fellatio. No other adult animals other than humans have been observed doing so, apparently. And apparently your dog licking himself for the hell of it doesn't count.

Comments

[randomdreams]

By the way, the weirdest penis bit in the above-mentioned book is a slug, Limax redii, in which "the penis is 85cm long, seven times the length of its owner's body."
This is weird enough I'm just going to type for a while.
"Courtship... involves two animals following each other ina clockwise manner on a vertical surface. On making contact they produce a mucus anchor rope from which they suspend themselves. As the entwined animals dangle ins pace they each evert and entwine their gigantic penises which far below their owners exchange sperm at their tips..." (they're hermaphrodites, again.)
"THeir enwined penises frequently become knotted during copulation and the only way individuals can release themselves is to bite off a penis at the base... Thereafter those individuals that have lost their penis in this way operate only as females."

Dude. DUDE. No idea things could be that complicated.

He also implies, but doesn't actually say, that the human penis is pretty much unique in mammals; all the others are either more or less rigid all the time and just stored carefully, or have integral bones to provide rigidity, and we're the only mammals in which it fills up with blood. I may be reading that wrong, though: there was a lot of information in the book and my head got all filled up and the stuffing started coming out.

And the discussions of why polyandry works best with not one, not three, but two males, and why it's more stable when they're brothers, and lots of stuff on the relationships between child-rearing strategies and sexual dimorphism, and! and! and! yeah now my head's all spinny yet again.

[jadine]

I got to watch a pair of leopard slugs, Limax maximus, have sex on my porch a couple months ago. It was amazing. This is what it looks like, about twenty minutes of action compressed to two: Youtube video

[memegarden]

Wow--thanks for the fascinating video.

[memegarden]

The excellent film Microcosmos includes a lengthy bit of aerial slug mating. They're all over each other. It's kind of hot. All mucous membrane, you know. No preposterously long penises that get tangled and have to be bitten off, though. That's a bad way to do it.

A lot of mammals do have a penis bone (mustelids, bears, walruses), but a lot don't, too. Whales, for instance, keep theirs coiled up in a pouch (and it's prehensile, like a tentacle!). Dogs and cats aren't rigid all the time either--just keep it retracted in its sheath. Dog sex is odd because of the "knotting" phenomenon, when the base of the penis swells up and the mating couple stays stuck together for a prolonged period after active copulation.

I recommend biandry myself.