Penis Dolphin
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Penis Dolphin
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Editor's Note: This story was updated to clarify the efforts underway to conserve the vaquita.
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An image reconstructed from CT scans showing how the penis of the common bottlenose dolphin (red) fits within the intricate folds and turns of a bottlenose dolphin vagina.
The study—one of the first of its kind in more than a century—sheds light on how mammals evolved to reproduce in water.
Thanks to a pressurized penis inflator and genitals flown in from across the U.S., an anatomist has answered a long sought-after question: how do the genitals of dolphins and porpoises fit together during sex?
In a word, swimmingly. In a presentation at this year’s Experimental Biology meeting in Chicago, Dalhousie University postdoctoral fellow Dara Orbach showed intimate 3-D scans of a variety of marine mammals. She presented scans of two species of dolphins, as well as harbor porpoises and harbor seals, all produced using genitalia collected from animals that died of natural causes.
At first blush, the intricacies of dolphin love may seem risqué. But Orbach’s work is some of the first in more than a century to reanalyze the female sexual anatomy of marine mammals—in this case, dolphins and porpoises. The finds also will help scientists see how evolution shaped the organs into their present forms.
“With basic anatomy, it is often thought that we scientists have a pretty good idea about mammalian structures and their functions, but this turns out not always to be true,” says Sarah Mesnick , an ecologist at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center , part of the National Marine Fisheries Service of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
“Orbach is experiencing anatomy as scientists did in the Age of Discovery, gaining new insights with each dissection,” she added.
In the field of sexual anatomy, there’s a lot left to discover. Precise studies of how genitals fit together have been mostly limited to small insects, spiders, and lizards (though at least one MRI study has looked at humans ). And science has long faced a gap in the study of female genitalia , fueled by the relative ease of studying penises and a long-held assumption that from species to species, vaginas don’t vary as much as penises. ( This 99-million-year-old fossil preserves an extinct arachnid’s erection. )
However, a March 2017 study that Orbach and Mesnick coauthored shows that marine mammals’ vaginas have a stunning diversity of inner flaps and folds. The vagina of the common bottlenose dolphin, for instance, has a single fold; the harbor porpoise’s, in contrast, has about thirteen. “The flaps, folds and blind alleys of the female reproductive tract may serve as a gauntlet that a male's sperm, or that of competing male rivals, must traverse to reach the egg,” Mesnick said in an email.
“All evidence so far seems to suggest that sexual selection seems to be driving this variation,” adds Orbach. “It’s a pretty amazing system to be working with.”
An Atlantic spotted dolphin and bottlenose dolphins swim in the waters off Bimini in the Bahamas.
But determining how evolution shaped these folds requires knowing precisely how penises and vaginas interact. Do dolphin penises penetrate the cervix during sex? How do structures on the penis align with the folds? And why?
To answer these questions, Orbach set out to collect reproductive tracts, asking NOAA’s National Marine Mammal Stranding Network , which responds when carcasses appear on U.S. beaches, for help. She now has about 75 tracts—excised during necropsies on the carcasses—in storage at Mount Holyoke College, where she is a research associate. “It’s like a birthday [when] you open up a stinky package,” says Orbach.
Once Orbach gets matching genitalia, she cleans up the tracts and then exhaustively measures them, collecting 50 types of data for a single vagina. She and her colleagues then create a silicone mold of the vagina’s interior. Separately, they inflate the penis until it’s erect using a pressurized keg of saltwater, and then they preserve it in a mixture of water, methanol, and the gas formaldehyde.
The team then inserts the rigid penis into a matching vagina, sews the two together, and preserves them in the formaldehyde mixture. Then it’s off to Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, where radiologist Mauricio Solano scans them in detail.
A male common bottlenose dolphin bares its penis while engaging in sexual play with another male, a behavior associated with building male-male bonds . The penises of cetaceans, the mammal subgroup that contains dolphins, tuck away into the body cavity when not in use.
Orbach says that down the line, her research could yield conservation benefits, especially when collecting sperm for artificial insemination. “If you have a biomimetic (artificial but lifelike) vagina, that could trigger the male to produce higher-quality sperm, as opposed to a different device,” she says.
It may be tempting to think that improvements to captive breeding could help Mexico’s vaquita, a porpoise down to its last 30 individuals because of illegal gillnet fishing. However, there are no vaquitas in captivity, much less any that are captively bred. At present, saving the species's last few members is of much greater concern: An emergency effort to locate, catch, and house remaining vaquitas will kick off in May, but there is no guarantee that the plan will succeed.
"Catching and caring for vaquitas may prove impossible, but unless we try, the species will likely vanish," the National Marine Mammal Foundation said in a statement about the plan . ( Read more about the vaquita. )
When discussing Orbach's research, she and Mesnick emphasize its more fundamental importance in our understanding of mammal biology.
“Across the animal kingdom, we can see and hear many aspects of mating, such as bright colors of courting males—or their songs—and the ensuing courtship rituals between the sexes. But in species with internal fertilization, there's just as fascinating a scene that goes on beyond our ability to see it,” said Mesnick. “What happens inside the female’s reproductive tract—the ultimate playing field for sexual selection—is just as important in influencing reproductive success.
“Work like this helps people understand what it means to be a mammal and part of this amazing natural diversity,” she added.
Studying this diversity has been a long, hard process, but as Orbach demonstrates, it’s a fitting—and scientifically satisfying—line of inquiry.
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A short list of some of nature’s most curious phalluses, from the echidna’s four-headed unit to the dolphin’s prehensile member
Birds have them , bees have them , even regular old fleas have them, but in the animal kingdom, no penis is exactly like the next. Across vastly different species and ecosystems, unique environmental pressures have allowed creatures of many species to evolve an array of shapes and sizes—from the electric blue penis of the leopard slug to the blue whale’s ten-foot phallus.
The more scientists learn about penises, the more they realize how varied sex organs are. Just ask Emily Willingham , a biologist and journalist who’s been studying penises for over a decade. Her book, Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis , hit shelves in September. Phallacy plunges readers into the wild and wacky world of animal genitalia while exploring the social and cultural significance of penises as symbols of power and identity.
Penises have been a longstanding subject of scientific fascination, and they’re far more studied than vaginas. One explanation for this research gap, says Willingham, is “because of who has been asking the questions until quite recently, and who's been deciding how those questions should be answered.”
Typically, a penis helps male animals reproduce sexually with a female—however, exceptions exist. Gender and sex rarely fit into tidy categories and animal penises are no different. Many of the creatures packing the most surprising phalluses are hermaphrodites, meaning they also have female reproductive organs.
“There's not a binary that is categorically one thing or the other when it comes to genitalia,” says Willingham.
These blurred lines often give rise to nature's most fascinating sexual organs. Here are eight penises that are as cool and surprising as the creatures that wield them:
Sometimes one just isn’t enough. Or so it seems for the echidna, a spiny egg-laying mammal , which has evolved a four-headed penis. During copulation, echidna penises operate on a part-time schedule: half the penis temporarily shuts down while the other two heads are responsible for fertilization. But those extra two heads aren’t there just to show off. Next time the echidna mates, he’ll alternate which half he uses.
By shutting down half of their penis at a time, male echidnas fit perfectly with the female’s two-branched reproductive tract. This creature’s coat of quills don’t spare its genitalia, which features penile spines—a horrifying frequent trait in the animal kingdom (even humans once had them ) which may increase fertilization success or trigger ovulation .
Dolphins are known for their intelligence, promiscuity and absurdly dexterous penises. They have a prehensile penis, meaning it can swivel, grab and grope, much like a human hand. A prehensile penis helps males navigate the complex, labyrinth-like reproductive tracts of female dolphins.
Dolphins don’t just use their penises for baby-making, either. Bottlenose dolphins frequently copulate for pleasure, and often with members of the same sex. Dolphin sex doesn’t last long, only about ten seconds, but males can ejaculate multiple times an hour.
En garde! Many animals use their penises for love, but flatworms also use theirs to fight.
Like many organisms with intriguing phalluses, flatworms that engage in penis fights are hermaphrodites—just one example that showcases how a sex binary system fails to account for the range, fluidity and diversity of many organisms. Some species of flatworm engage in this duel to see who can inseminate the other.
Their two-headed penises resemble tiny swords, and battles can last for up to an hour as they take turns attempting to stab the other. The winner pierces the flesh of the other flatworm to deposit their sperm, something scientists refer to as “traumatic insemination.”
Mating can be competitive, with a single flatworm fertilizing another. In other cases, like with the tiger flatworm, they can play both roles: each flatworm gives and receives sperm from its partner.
Blue whales are the largest creature to ever roam the earth, and they certainly have the phallus to match. Blue whale penises range between eight and ten feet , with a foot-long diameter. Each of its testes along can weigh up to 150 pounds and can ejaculate gallons of sperm in a single go.
Whale penises are so famously oversized that in Moby Dick , Herman Melville suggests using the skin of a sperm whale’s phallus as a floor-length apron to stay tidy while skinning the rest of the whale. We’ll have to take Melville’s word on that one.
The blue whale might have the world’s biggest penis, but size is relative. Barnacles have the biggest penis-to-body size ratio, with genitalia nearly eight-times their total body length.
Barnacles are stuck in place for life, so they use their super-long penises to reach other nearby crustaceans, blindly depositing sperm inside their neighbors. Like flatworms, barnacles are hermaphrodites that can fertilize others, be fertilized or both.
Scientists have found that barnacle penis features change based on where they live . Those in rougher waters have shorter, stouter penises, while those in calmer areas have long, slender penises.
If humans had the same penis-to-body-sized ratio as barnacles, our penises would be as long as a humpback whale, so about 50 feet in length, says Willingham.
Bed bugs are famous for their aggressive, stabbing sex . Sometimes, overzealous males kill females with their saber-like penis in the process.
Willingham explains that this violent process has caused bedbugs to evolve “something very vagina-like where they tend to get stabbed.” This special less-armored area of their abdomen might minimize harm as the male injects his sperm into the female’s circulatory system.
Not much shocks Willingham about animal penises anymore, but she says she was surprised to learn about a microscopic, eyeless cave insect , which upends how scientists understand sex.
Males of the species have a vagina-like pouch containing sperm, while females have a special penis-like organ that penetrates and vacuums up sperm from the male.
Unlike other species that use a similar process—butterflies, mites, beetles—males of these species don’t have a similar penetrative organ, only the females do, says Willingham.
Meet Chromodoris reticulata, a type of sea slug, that has to reckon with a scary reality: sex means saying goodbye to their penis. At least, for the day.
Chromodoris reticulata are hermaphrodites and fertilize each other simultaneously during sex. Each has a three-centimeter-long schlong , but they only extend a centimeter
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