That meant to understand the animals’ vaginas, she needed their corresponding penises to see how they fit together during intercourse. “But as I started dissecting more and more reproductive tracts and looking at this amazing level of vaginal variability which had never been documented before, I realized this probably somehow coevolved with the penis,” said Orbach.
She already knew that marine mammal vaginas are far more complex than anyone has given them credit for - lots of labyrinthine pockets, folds, and twists, which Orbach suspects may help females control paternity. Orbach, a postdoctoral fellow at Dalhousie University and research associate at Mount Holyoke College, had the vaginas ready. The goal: make the first 3-D CT scans of simulated intercourse of any marine mammal species using real, post-mortem genitalia - scans that were just published in a paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. “They have what’s called a ‘fibroelastic’ penis,” she explained, which means their penile tissue contains “ a lot of collagen, and it makes the penis, even when flaccid, very stiff and less extensible.”įinding a way around this hard problem is a large part of why Dara Orbach and Patricia Brennan brought Kelly on to the project. “It’s actually a real challenge to artificially inflate cetacean penises,” she told me. Yes, the size makes things difficult - it takes a lot more saline to fill a large penis than a small one - but it’s more than that. But whale and dolphin penises are a lot tougher - quite literally. Like most mammals, human penises are mostly fleshy, with lots of vascular space for blood to flow into to make the flaccid structure rigid with turgor pressure. Reinflating human penises postmortem is a relatively trivial feat, says Diane Kelly, a research assistant professor at University of Massachusetts and penis inflation expert.
Perhaps the hardest part about studying marine mammal reproductive anatomy using organs collected from deceased animals is that they can’t get an erection the easy way.
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