>>16972947
Grandfather of evolutionary biology Charles Darwin wrote that โgenitals do not concern usโ and largely avoided the topic. Female animals were then viewed as less evolved versions of males โ smaller, more immature, less aggressive. Females upheld the Victorian standards of the era, or โthe coy female,โ as Darwin described. Textbooks on animal behavior wrote about the โreluctant female and the ardent male.โ
Amidst mounting evidence to the contrary, Colombian biologist Patricia Brennan started studying vaginas.
She began with the mallard. After finding a spiral shaped, wormlike penis in blue-gray birds called tinamou in Costa Rica (when 97% of birds have no external genitals), she turned her attention to the duck. When she discovered the fowlโs huge corkscrew-shaped phallus and the disturbing sex act that came along with it, she nearly fell off her chair. It made her wonder โ what did the corresponding vagina look like?
She found that they were just as elaborate, filled with byzantine crevices and blind alleys. During regular copulation, the female anatomy works counter-clockwise to the maleโs. When copulation is forced โ which it often is โ a female duckโs elaborate anatomy protects them with tooth-like cavities.
Brennanโs duck work โtransformed scientific thinking and rehabilitated the female from passive victim to active agent of her own evolutionary destiny,โ writes Cooke.
But duck sex was just the โgateway drug.โ Other animals followed, including the dolphin which has strikingly similar spiral shaped sex organs. โConvergent evolution with a duck!โ Brennan said to Cooke. โItโs nuts!โ
Like ducks, female dolphins can shift their body and force a penis into a blind alley. โFemales have evolved creative ways to control the insemination of their eggs, even when males are more powerful, numerous or forceful,โ Cooke writes.
The battle of the sex organs often has wide evolutionary implications. When male mosquito fish evolve longer genitals, for example, the femalesโ brains actually grow bigger โto outwit their aggressors.โ
Eventually, Brennan set herself a new goal to compile the worldโs first physical library of animal vaginas.
โUnderstanding genital evolution is hampered by an outdated single-sex bias.โ
Study on male-skewing trends in animal research, or as one biologist calls it, โvaginal neglectโ
โSo many vaginas, such a short life,โ Brennan told Cooke.
Her investigations revealed how adaptable the organ is: for example, the female privates of the spiny dogfish change shape, becoming more asymmetrical in pregnancy to accommodate pups. But nothing is quite as remarkable as the opossum, which has a surprise vagina that disappears โlike a secret doorโ after giving birth. Opossum also have two uteri, two ovaries, and two other vaginas.
There are female moles with โballs,โ called ovotestes, that consist of both ovarian and testicular tissue. The ovaries produce eggs and the testes make testosterone, but not sperm, to beef up the moleโs aggression and body mass. These parts of the body shrink and expand according to need and breeding season.
Then there are all the fake phalluses. Madagascarโs Fossa, which Cooke describes as a โpuma with a shrunken head,โ actually grows an โinternal boneโ to look like a male penis, even exuding a yellow liquid on its underside. The pretend penis disappears when the fossa is old enough to mate. Researchers believe it evolved to โprotect them from unwanted attention from older males and territorial females.โ
The ring-tailed lemur also has a pseudo-scrotum and an extended clitoris that is nearly identical to a lemur penis. They could, if they wanted, โwrite their name in the snow,โ joked one lemur researcher.
Genitals evolve faster than any other body part, Cooke writes, and Brennan and other researchers believe that females actually play a greater role in genital natural selection than males, thereby acting as more active agents of evolution than any of the earlier, male-centric researchers could have imagined.
end part 2 of 2 (article continuesโฆbut you get the point)
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