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Detachable Penis & 8 Other Ways To Make Your Love-life Seem Boring
Because you keep on encouraging me...
Detachable Penis & 8 Other Ways To Make Your Love-life Seem Boring
Unlike my last Top Ten post, which was mostly reproductive behaviour and genetics, and the one before that, which was about Prize Bastards Of The Animal Kingdom ( I bowdlerize... ) this one is mostly comparative anatomy. Nonetheless, even if I stick with the larger and better known metazoans it should completely undermine whatever you think is normal and hopefully have you involuntarily clenching your thighs a few times, or I'm not doing my job properly.
Much, much, NSFW beneath the cut...
#9 - Variations on the 'Norm'
Leaving aside for the moment the incredible conceit that human reproductive anatomy is in any way 'normal', vertebrates have nonetheless come up with at least a few variations on the theme of 'Recreational Area Running Through The Middle Of A Sewage Works". The penis, for example, has been independently invented in at least 5 different groups of vertebrates, let alone all the invertebrates that would no doubt be getting spam email if they could read it ( Add Millimetres To Your Maleness! ).
The human member is a very dull design, compared to many species, notable only for its unusual girth. It lacks the barbs cats use to induce ovulation, the cockscrew of a pig's pork sword, or even the startling spikes and prongs of the golden potto, one of our fellow primates. A lot of these elaborations are the result of trying to keep ahead of the females tendency to wander ( Ribbed, for her pleasure). Generally speaking, the more elaborate the appendage, the more difficulty the males is having trying to be the only father.
And internally, the majority of mammalian members - most primates, rodents, carnivores, and pinnipeds - contain a baculum, or os penis. This provides extra rigidity, and can be broken. Of course the human penis can be fractured too, despite our lack of a baculum, but that's more of a catastrophic failure of the hydraulic tissue. The phrase "burst like an over-cooked breakfast sausage" has been used.
If baculums intrigue you, I suggest the Icelandic Penis Museum, which exhibits an example of a baculum from every mammal found on and around the island. Some can be quite large. The walrus boner, for example, is large enough to be used as a ceremonial club. There's quite a demand for them, too.
#8 - Two Heads Are Better Than One
Lizards and snakes, for example, have a pair of penises ( One for everyday and one for Sunday Best?) and sharks and rays have a pair of modified pelvic fins called claspers. And the echidna impresses the ladies with a magnificent four-headed dong.
But for cringe induction, the bifurcated penis of all but the largest marsupials is difficult to beat. Not so much for the bifurcation itself - it was the mammalian default setting long before we stopped laying eggs and invented the nipple - but because of that tribe of Central Australia that emulate it with ritual self-mutilation.
#7 - Born Again
And just so the lovely ladies of WTF_nature don't feel too left out, I should cover the female equivalents. Oddly enough, there isn't nearly as much variation among ladybits, at least up this end of the animal family tree. Certainly, most marsupials enjoy a bifurcated uterus ( hey, it matches the males ) but for a female mammal to take things to unusual lengths we have to give the prize to the yapok.
A yapok is a marsupial, a South American opossum, in fact, and like the rest of its extended family only use the uterus for the first few weeks or months of gestation. Then the foetus - jellybean sized at best, in the kangaroos - is born and has to crawl up her belly to the pouch to complete its development. A second uterus, as it were. Born-again Mammals.
And the yapok is an aquatic marsupial. So the pouch can seal up tight enough to be waterproof whilst she swims around. Oddly enough, they're also the only remaining species on the planet where both genders have a pouch. He keeps his genitals in his.
#6 - Butch
Off at the other extreme of female mammal anatomy we can't go past the spotted hyena. It's very difficult to go past them, given they have such eye-popping groin ornaments you can't help but stop and yell "What the HELL is that?" Their claim to fame is a pseudopenis, or rather peniform clitoris, that reaches to their knees when erect, not to mention the pseudoscrotum that comes with the set. And they're something of a mystery. Crocuta crocuta isn't the only mammal where the ladies are startlingly butch ( the more matriarchal species of lemur are another ) but Spotted Hyenas take outdoing their menfolk so seriously it's a very serious threat to their health. For one thing, they have to try and be impregnated through it. And then, far worse, they have to give birth through it. And when the birth canal now has a right-angle turn and is longer than the umbilical cord. Not surprisingly, there's massive mortality rates among first-born hyena cubs, and all too frequently the mother dies of blood loss and infection as her clitoris is torn apart by the cub she's trying to push out through it.
So what's the point? Surely there's no selective advantage to such a horrifying case of terminal testosterone poisoning? But Spotted Hyena society is completely matriarchal - the females totally dominate the males, the biggest and nastiest dominate everybody, and a massive dose of androgens late in gestation is just the thing to ensure the girl cubs can kick their brothers from here to Kilimanjaro. Of course, it also means they're all born so psychotically insane that the biggest threat to a new-born cub (assuming it even survived the birth ) is to be murdered by a sibling. They calm down after the first week, though, which is just as well. And despite all this, it's still enough of an advantage that they develop the epic hyena anatomy even if the androgens are blocked with drugs.
#5 - Revenge On Your Men
After those little details I suspect a lot of my female readers are looking at the other gender with a certain amount of loathing, and I can't say I blame you. Thus, I'll give you one of the many, many example of a species where after laying the eggs the female happily leaves her mate to do all the dirty work.
Seahorses and their relatives the pipe-fish brood the eggs on their bellies. In the seahorses the brooding pouch is a large elaborate structure, especially once it's filled with up to 1500 seafoals. You'll be pleased to know that he has contractions, and as of today nobody has invented epidurals for seahorses. Seahorses are also strongly monogamous, which is cute. Unpleasantly, male pipefish are now known to selectively abort fetuses from unattractive females.
#4 - Making Do With Other Orifices
Of course if your young are born almost helpless or worse and you don't have a pouch to care for them, then you'll have to find an alternative. In the case of Darwin's Frog, it's the vocal sac. In the case of the sadly extinct gastric-brooding frog of Australia, it was the stomach. But for an example of this sort of behaviour that you can actually see at home I'll have to push for the Mouthbrooding Cichlids. There's lots of species of mouthbrooding fish, but it's the cichlids that are most famous for it and have become such sought-after aquarium fish as a result.
Naturally, calling all your fry back to hide in your mouth at any sign of danger can make it quite difficult to eat, especially if you're that male being studied by pioneer ethnologist Konrad Lorenz ( At least, I'm fairly certain it was him. I've turned the bookshelf upside down but can't find which Gerald Durrell book I'm pretty sure I first read it in ). Dropping a worm into the tank resulted in a fish that had a mouthful of babies it wanted to protect and a mouthful of worm it wanted to swallow. Apparently you could almost see it go cross-eyed with the mental effort it needed to solve the dilemma. Its solution was to spit everything out, eat the worm, then scoop up his babies again, an answer that earned him a round of sincere applause from the students that had gathered around to watch.
#3 - Not To Be Used For Unintended Purposes
Of course I can't go past all these examples of unconventional reproductive solutions without mentioning oral sex. There's those fruit bats for a start who find copulation much more prolonged and presumably enjoyable if it includes a blowjob. Before, during, and after.. But those have been in the news for months now. So, it's to Dunnocks that this category is awarded, small sparrow-like birds that can do something clever with their peckers.
To whit, the male will peck the female's cloaca as a prelude to sex. If he does it well enough and long enough, she'll eject her last mate's sperm. ( See, fellas? There's an evolutionary benefit to cunnilingus ).
I tried to find Sir David's Attenborough's clip about this on Youtube. No such luck. I guess you'll just have to settle for this video of walrus fellatio ( how many of you expected one of the many such videos to appear up there in the baculum paragraph?)
#2 - Still With The Oral Sex
The tiny sea slug Sapha amicorum is a native of the Red Sea. Its penis is inside its mouth. What a brilliant discovery! Combining french kissing and oral sex into one handy action.
It's also a hermaphrodite, like many sea slugs. In those species that can occasionally self-fertilise, there is indeed a vas deferens between the male and female gonads. ( Bdum-tish. I'm an evil, evil man. As if the rest of the info, puns, and links in this post weren't proof enough of that )
#1 - Tentacle Porn
And finally we get to the title piece - the astonishing sex-life of another mollusc, the Paper Nautilus. Popular belief and 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea claimed that Argonauta bobbed around in their little papery shells and used their flattened shell-secreting arms as sails.
But that's not nearly weird enough for wtf_nature. Because as if octopus sex wasn't weird enough already, what with the modified arms and stuffing exploding sperm packets up your mates nose or anywhere else you can reach, the Paper Nautiluses just HAD to find a way to go one better. They invented a detachable penis. That was originally mistaken for a parasitic worm.
Although, to be fair, they're not the only species to do so. The palolo worm of Fiji, Indonesia, and Samoa undergoes mass spawning on nights of the waning moon in Spring and Summer, by breaking off their own reproductive segments which then swim to the surface in a giant orgy of sexual soup and runaway sex organs. They're also a highly prized and much anticipated local delicacy.
But whilst you digest that, back to the argonauts. Females grow up to 10 centimetres across, and their shells up to three times that. Unsurprisingly, they've been known since recorded history began, but the males are only 2 centimetres across at best, and weren't discovered until the late 19th century! The males sever their own sperm-charged hectocotyle arms when they're trying to mate, which then crawls off to find it's own way across the female, whilst they themselves crawl off to die. Oddly enough, Aristotle had known about the hectocotyl arms back in his time, but nobody believed him by the time Georges Cuvier rediscovered the things and named them as a new and peculiar form of parasitic worm.
Detachable Penis & 8 Other Ways To Make Your Love-life Seem Boring
Unlike my last Top Ten post, which was mostly reproductive behaviour and genetics, and the one before that, which was about Prize Bastards Of The Animal Kingdom ( I bowdlerize... ) this one is mostly comparative anatomy. Nonetheless, even if I stick with the larger and better known metazoans it should completely undermine whatever you think is normal and hopefully have you involuntarily clenching your thighs a few times, or I'm not doing my job properly.
Much, much, NSFW beneath the cut...
#9 - Variations on the 'Norm'
Leaving aside for the moment the incredible conceit that human reproductive anatomy is in any way 'normal', vertebrates have nonetheless come up with at least a few variations on the theme of 'Recreational Area Running Through The Middle Of A Sewage Works". The penis, for example, has been independently invented in at least 5 different groups of vertebrates, let alone all the invertebrates that would no doubt be getting spam email if they could read it ( Add Millimetres To Your Maleness! ).
The human member is a very dull design, compared to many species, notable only for its unusual girth. It lacks the barbs cats use to induce ovulation, the cockscrew of a pig's pork sword, or even the startling spikes and prongs of the golden potto, one of our fellow primates. A lot of these elaborations are the result of trying to keep ahead of the females tendency to wander ( Ribbed, for her pleasure). Generally speaking, the more elaborate the appendage, the more difficulty the males is having trying to be the only father.
And internally, the majority of mammalian members - most primates, rodents, carnivores, and pinnipeds - contain a baculum, or os penis. This provides extra rigidity, and can be broken. Of course the human penis can be fractured too, despite our lack of a baculum, but that's more of a catastrophic failure of the hydraulic tissue. The phrase "burst like an over-cooked breakfast sausage" has been used.
If baculums intrigue you, I suggest the Icelandic Penis Museum, which exhibits an example of a baculum from every mammal found on and around the island. Some can be quite large. The walrus boner, for example, is large enough to be used as a ceremonial club. There's quite a demand for them, too.
#8 - Two Heads Are Better Than One
Lizards and snakes, for example, have a pair of penises ( One for everyday and one for Sunday Best?) and sharks and rays have a pair of modified pelvic fins called claspers. And the echidna impresses the ladies with a magnificent four-headed dong.
But for cringe induction, the bifurcated penis of all but the largest marsupials is difficult to beat. Not so much for the bifurcation itself - it was the mammalian default setting long before we stopped laying eggs and invented the nipple - but because of that tribe of Central Australia that emulate it with ritual self-mutilation.
#7 - Born Again
And just so the lovely ladies of WTF_nature don't feel too left out, I should cover the female equivalents. Oddly enough, there isn't nearly as much variation among ladybits, at least up this end of the animal family tree. Certainly, most marsupials enjoy a bifurcated uterus ( hey, it matches the males ) but for a female mammal to take things to unusual lengths we have to give the prize to the yapok.
A yapok is a marsupial, a South American opossum, in fact, and like the rest of its extended family only use the uterus for the first few weeks or months of gestation. Then the foetus - jellybean sized at best, in the kangaroos - is born and has to crawl up her belly to the pouch to complete its development. A second uterus, as it were. Born-again Mammals.
And the yapok is an aquatic marsupial. So the pouch can seal up tight enough to be waterproof whilst she swims around. Oddly enough, they're also the only remaining species on the planet where both genders have a pouch. He keeps his genitals in his.
#6 - Butch
Off at the other extreme of female mammal anatomy we can't go past the spotted hyena. It's very difficult to go past them, given they have such eye-popping groin ornaments you can't help but stop and yell "What the HELL is that?" Their claim to fame is a pseudopenis, or rather peniform clitoris, that reaches to their knees when erect, not to mention the pseudoscrotum that comes with the set. And they're something of a mystery. Crocuta crocuta isn't the only mammal where the ladies are startlingly butch ( the more matriarchal species of lemur are another ) but Spotted Hyenas take outdoing their menfolk so seriously it's a very serious threat to their health. For one thing, they have to try and be impregnated through it. And then, far worse, they have to give birth through it. And when the birth canal now has a right-angle turn and is longer than the umbilical cord. Not surprisingly, there's massive mortality rates among first-born hyena cubs, and all too frequently the mother dies of blood loss and infection as her clitoris is torn apart by the cub she's trying to push out through it.
Click to viewSo what's the point? Surely there's no selective advantage to such a horrifying case of terminal testosterone poisoning? But Spotted Hyena society is completely matriarchal - the females totally dominate the males, the biggest and nastiest dominate everybody, and a massive dose of androgens late in gestation is just the thing to ensure the girl cubs can kick their brothers from here to Kilimanjaro. Of course, it also means they're all born so psychotically insane that the biggest threat to a new-born cub (assuming it even survived the birth ) is to be murdered by a sibling. They calm down after the first week, though, which is just as well. And despite all this, it's still enough of an advantage that they develop the epic hyena anatomy even if the androgens are blocked with drugs.
#5 - Revenge On Your Men
After those little details I suspect a lot of my female readers are looking at the other gender with a certain amount of loathing, and I can't say I blame you. Thus, I'll give you one of the many, many example of a species where after laying the eggs the female happily leaves her mate to do all the dirty work.
Seahorses and their relatives the pipe-fish brood the eggs on their bellies. In the seahorses the brooding pouch is a large elaborate structure, especially once it's filled with up to 1500 seafoals. You'll be pleased to know that he has contractions, and as of today nobody has invented epidurals for seahorses. Seahorses are also strongly monogamous, which is cute. Unpleasantly, male pipefish are now known to selectively abort fetuses from unattractive females.
#4 - Making Do With Other Orifices
Of course if your young are born almost helpless or worse and you don't have a pouch to care for them, then you'll have to find an alternative. In the case of Darwin's Frog, it's the vocal sac. In the case of the sadly extinct gastric-brooding frog of Australia, it was the stomach. But for an example of this sort of behaviour that you can actually see at home I'll have to push for the Mouthbrooding Cichlids. There's lots of species of mouthbrooding fish, but it's the cichlids that are most famous for it and have become such sought-after aquarium fish as a result.
Naturally, calling all your fry back to hide in your mouth at any sign of danger can make it quite difficult to eat, especially if you're that male being studied by pioneer ethnologist Konrad Lorenz ( At least, I'm fairly certain it was him. I've turned the bookshelf upside down but can't find which Gerald Durrell book I'm pretty sure I first read it in ). Dropping a worm into the tank resulted in a fish that had a mouthful of babies it wanted to protect and a mouthful of worm it wanted to swallow. Apparently you could almost see it go cross-eyed with the mental effort it needed to solve the dilemma. Its solution was to spit everything out, eat the worm, then scoop up his babies again, an answer that earned him a round of sincere applause from the students that had gathered around to watch.
#3 - Not To Be Used For Unintended Purposes
Of course I can't go past all these examples of unconventional reproductive solutions without mentioning oral sex. There's those fruit bats for a start who find copulation much more prolonged and presumably enjoyable if it includes a blowjob. Before, during, and after.. But those have been in the news for months now. So, it's to Dunnocks that this category is awarded, small sparrow-like birds that can do something clever with their peckers.
To whit, the male will peck the female's cloaca as a prelude to sex. If he does it well enough and long enough, she'll eject her last mate's sperm. ( See, fellas? There's an evolutionary benefit to cunnilingus ).
I tried to find Sir David's Attenborough's clip about this on Youtube. No such luck. I guess you'll just have to settle for this video of walrus fellatio ( how many of you expected one of the many such videos to appear up there in the baculum paragraph?)
#2 - Still With The Oral Sex
The tiny sea slug Sapha amicorum is a native of the Red Sea. Its penis is inside its mouth. What a brilliant discovery! Combining french kissing and oral sex into one handy action.
It's also a hermaphrodite, like many sea slugs. In those species that can occasionally self-fertilise, there is indeed a vas deferens between the male and female gonads. ( Bdum-tish. I'm an evil, evil man. As if the rest of the info, puns, and links in this post weren't proof enough of that )
#1 - Tentacle Porn
And finally we get to the title piece - the astonishing sex-life of another mollusc, the Paper Nautilus. Popular belief and 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea claimed that Argonauta bobbed around in their little papery shells and used their flattened shell-secreting arms as sails.
But that's not nearly weird enough for wtf_nature. Because as if octopus sex wasn't weird enough already, what with the modified arms and stuffing exploding sperm packets up your mates nose or anywhere else you can reach, the Paper Nautiluses just HAD to find a way to go one better. They invented a detachable penis. That was originally mistaken for a parasitic worm.
Although, to be fair, they're not the only species to do so. The palolo worm of Fiji, Indonesia, and Samoa undergoes mass spawning on nights of the waning moon in Spring and Summer, by breaking off their own reproductive segments which then swim to the surface in a giant orgy of sexual soup and runaway sex organs. They're also a highly prized and much anticipated local delicacy.
But whilst you digest that, back to the argonauts. Females grow up to 10 centimetres across, and their shells up to three times that. Unsurprisingly, they've been known since recorded history began, but the males are only 2 centimetres across at best, and weren't discovered until the late 19th century! The males sever their own sperm-charged hectocotyle arms when they're trying to mate, which then crawls off to find it's own way across the female, whilst they themselves crawl off to die. Oddly enough, Aristotle had known about the hectocotyl arms back in his time, but nobody believed him by the time Georges Cuvier rediscovered the things and named them as a new and peculiar form of parasitic worm.