![]() ![]() “There has been a fascination with penises for a long time. “There was an incredible gap in our understanding of female species, of vaginas,” explains Brennan. But Brennan showed that females develop locks to keep out the keys, not the other way round. if a penis – the key – was shaped in a certain way, it was because the vagina – the lock – was perfectly designed for it. The form of male genitalia has been studied within the framework of the lock-and-key hypothesis i.e. As Richard Prum, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University, who worked with Brennan explains in his book The Evolution of Beauty: “ observations confirmed that the clockwise spirals of the duck vagina literally function as an anti-screw device.” “This was a very disquieting topic in the age of Darwin and it also seems that way to many today,” explains Brennan. Especially given the legacy of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which has led to today’s understanding of sex selection as two machos fighting to the death. This perception of females as active agents in reproduction, capable of choosing their partner and even molding their very species, shocked the science world to its core. The result is that in duck species that have fewer cases of rape, the male has a smaller penis, as the female has not had to adapt its sexual organs to maintain its reproductive control.Ī recent study of Australopithecus ramidus, an early hominid species, found that males had smaller teeth as females chose less violent partners. “At the end of the day, the females are winning the battle, they evolved an adaptation which gives the majority of paternity to the male that they have chosen.”īy contracting the vaginal muscles, the female duck is able to expel sperm. “It’s incredible, it’s a very feminist story,” says Brennan. In other words, they are fighting for control over their reproductive autonomy. ![]() In response to this aggression, female ducks have evolved labyrinthine vaginas to prevent male ducks from fertilizing their eggs. “ suffer enormously during the sexual assaults, even dying,” explains Brennan, who is an assistant professor of biological sciences at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. When a male duck does not have a partner, it violently forces itself on a female duck, sometimes as part of a group. Lisa Quinones (©Lisa Quinones)īrennan’s finding was important because it helped explain the strange shape of the duck penis. Patricia Brennan at Mount Holyoke College. As a result, most bird experts had only ever studied the oviduct. He also said that he had never seen anything like it before.ĭucks are among the 3% of bird species that use a penis to copulate, the rest use a maneuver known as the “cloacal kiss,” in which a male bird transfers sperm by pressing its genital opening with the female’s. After proving that it wasn’t just an abnormality in a particular specimen, they reached out to the leading bird expert in France. Brennan’s boss couldn’t believe the results. How could it be that no one had seen it and described this?” Instead of a simple tube for a vagina, a female duck has a large, fibrous and labyrinthine anatomy. “The vagina felt very thick, very strange and when this structure appeared I couldn’t believe it. “It was one of those incredible moments where you say to yourself, ‘Wow, I can’t believe what I’m seeing’,” she tells EL PAÍS via a video call. It was the beginning of a small revolution. ![]() That very same day, Brennan traveled to a farm near Sheffield University in England, where she was completing her postdoctoral investigation, and bought two female ducks so she could dissect them and study their vaginas. While many scientists had studied animal penises, almost nobody was interested in vaginas. The question opened a whole new field of investigation for the Colombia-born researcher. “My immediate question was: And the female birds? Where does this horrible penis go?” No one had asked this before, despite the extensive knowledge that existed on the male duck penis. “It was like an enormous tentacle,” she remembers, laughing. It measured 20 centimeters – proportionally giant to its body – and was spiral-shaped. When biologist Patricia Brennan first saw a duck penis, she says she nearly fell off her chair. ![]()
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