DOWN THERE (Part 1): Making Sense of Amazing Genitalia

 

Fruitflies doing the business (Illustration: Aya Takahashi)

By Richard Conniff

It looked like a penis, only smaller

Oh, and with claws on the sides. 

The carcass, a monkey-like species called the woolly lemur, was laid out on a dissecting table at a research station in Madagascar.  A goshawk had killed it the day before and stripped it to the bone from the waist up. 

“Here’s the intestine.  You can see where it was ripped off,” said the biologist.  She had the unsqueamish enthusiasm of a Girl Scout crossed with a dental technician. Then she reached into the fur and delicately drew out the penis. It was almost human in shape, except for the two claws, about a third of the way down from the tip.  When she tapped them with her dissecting tool, they made a hard, clicking sound. “Like cat claws,” the biologist remarked, and a shudder passed through the room. One earnest onlooker asked if the claws perhaps helped the male hang onto the female, to keep rival males from taking his place?  “But woolly lemurs live in monogamous pairs,” the biologist said.  Someone else wondered if woolly lemurs perhaps like it … rough? 

It was a weird little moment.  But, fair warning, it gets much weirder. 

The animal world is full of genitalia which strike even biologists as too bizarre to have evolved solely for the relatively straightforward business of passing sperm from male to female.  We’re not just talking about the obvious stuff:  Everybody who watches Animal Planet already knows, for instance, that sharks typically come with two penises.  Avid naturalists may also know that in hyenas, where females are the dominant gender, the clitoris has evolved to look like a penis, and that one female approaching another will often display a prominent erection. 

But that sort of thing seems normal, almost, compared with what biologists find when they look a little closer, particularly at some of the more obscure members of the Wild Kingdom. Under the covers in this strange world are genitalia that give rich new meaning to the concept of kinky.

There are, for instance, hermaphroditic snails which mate as male and female simultaneously and, just to keep things interesting, also jab spears and darts into each other’s genitalia. 

There’s a fish which inserts a siphon into the female, then squirts seawater out the tip in a spiral rotary motion.  (It’s a contraceptive douche, to dislodge the sperm of other males that have gotten there before him.) 

There’s a beetle with a penis like a folded umbrella.  Once snugly ensconced within the female, it pops opens.  Nobody knows if the idea is to stimulate her, or to irritate her so much she never wants to mate again. 

Animals inhabit a giddy world of female parts full of twists, turns, and corkscrew spirals, and male parts studded with bumps, knobs, hooks, ridges, valves, and french ticklers.  Vladimir Nabokov, who liked to pin out butterflies when he wasn’t writing novels, once described the genitalia of his study subjects as “sculpturesque.”  Biologist Marlene Zuk has likewise celebrated genitalia that “resemble bits of the decorations on Old World cathedrals.”  Charles Darwin himself enthused over a barnacle penis lying “coiled up, like a great worm,” which when “fully extended … must equal between eight or nine times the length of the animal.” 

But the study of genitalia isn’t merely weird and entertaining.  It has become one of the hottest topics in modern biology because it also casts a revealing light on the relationship between male and female.  Is the act of sex, as we like to imagine, a moment of extraordinary intimacy and cooperation between the sexes?  Or is it just a way of making war by other means, a struggle marked by conflict, manipulation, exploitation, and mayhem?    

 

Big, Bad & Very, Very Toothy: A Shark’s Tale

by Richard Conniff/The Wall Street Journal

Megalodon lived. Past tense. The largest shark ever, and arguably the largest predator, went extinct 2.6 million or more years ago. And it has stayed that way. But Hollywood sequel makers will be pleased to know that megalodon still somehow manages to kill on average two people a year, according to Tim and Emma Flannery. More on that later.

In “Big Meg: The Story of the Largest and Most Mysterious Predator That Ever Lived,” the Flannerys, a father-and-daughter pair of Australian scientists, provide a more complete and accurate picture of megalodon than you are likely to see on any television or movie screen. The authors tell us, among other things, that megalodon had nurseries in parts of what are now Maryland, South Carolina and Florida; that it was warm-blooded; and that its young were more than 6 feet long at birth. Like some modern sharks, but on a grander scale, megalodon practiced intrauterine cannibalism, and only the strong emerged to see the outside world. The adult megalodon, the Flannerys write, was big enough to be the scourge of the seas and an “emblem of all the unspoken, hidden terrors that haunt our imaginations.”

Just how big? Was it 50 feet long? Or maybe 65? The book is vague on such details for good reason. Not only does megalodon not exist in the modern world; there is also hardly any fossil evidence, apart from its teeth, that it ever existed. Megalodon’s massive body was built on cartilage, not bone, and cartilage does not fossilize well. The Flannerys hold out hope that a “whole-body” megalodon fossil might someday turn up, a result of extraordinary circumstances of preservation. It happened in 2017 for a contemporary, the giant mackerel shark, an extinct ancestor of today’s great white shark. But the lack so far of anything comparable for megalodon means that the Flannerys must often resort to “mights,” “maybes” and “just imagines.”

About megalodon teeth, their account is sharply detailed. Megalodon’s mouth contained about 272 of them, arranged in four rows, rotating forward as the front teeth broke off in heavy use. And heavy use is what they got. Whales were their common prey, according to the Flannerys, and megalodon’s mouth was big enough “to swallow an orca whole.” Biting and shaking its way through such massive prey, a single shark could shed tens of thousands of teeth over its centurylong life. Unlike its cartilaginous skeleton, its arrowhead-shaped teeth were made of unusually hard material and remain scattered abundantly across the planet.

Watch Out, Stephen Curry, Moths Have Hand-Eye Coordination, too

A hawkmoth ready to uncurl that proboscis into a nectary (Photo: Anna Stöckl)

by Richard Conniff

I have mixed feelings about sphingid moths, sometimes called sphinx moths because the position their caterpillars commonly assume is said to resemble the Great Sphinx of Giza (but I don’t see it). I prefer to call them hummingbird moths, or just plain hawkmoths. On the one hand, I am deeply prejudiced against some of them for a selfish reason: One of the most dismaying experiences for any vegetable gardener is to step out one morning in late July, just as the luscious and long-awaited tomatoes are coming due–and discover the stems and branches of the tomato plants suddenly stripped bare of leaves. The culprit is the caterpillar of the five-spotted hawkmoth (Manduca quinquemaculata), and they are wonderfully camouflaged to keep their enemies (me, among others) from finding them.

It’s some consolation to find caterpillars after parasitic wasps have already gotten to them. You can see the caterpillar’s body ornamented with the pearly pupae of the next wasp generation. (See the photo at left.) Those I leave where they are, for the budding young wasps to emerge and destroy other tomato hornworms, the ones I haven’t managed to find. The hornworms I find in good health, them I murder.

OK, I’ve gotten that off my chest. The truth of course is that I should not generalize. There are many other species of hawkmoth (1450 of them) that are entirely innocent of molesting my tomato plants. So let’s move on.

I admire hawkmoths mainly for the speed and purposefulness of their flight, the way they whip from plant to plant almost like hummingbirds, with that same motor-like whirring of their wings. Their wingbeat, up to 80 times a second, is actually faster than a hummingbird’s And then there’s the needle-thin proboscis they use for sucking up nectar from flowers. It’s as long as, and sometimes much longer than, the rest of the hawkmoth’s body. 

NAMIBIA TAKES A HAMMER TO ITS BELOVED COMMUNITY CONSERVANCIES

Community conservancies have thrived in part by protecting endangered black rhinos (Photo: Getty)

by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360

In the starkly beautiful desert landscape of Namibia, on the southwest coast of Africa, I have followed behind as Khoisan trackers conducted a second-by-second forensic reconstruction of a murder scene. (The victim was a young giraffe pounced on by a leopard half its weight.) I have climbed mountainous red sand dunes to watch beetles doing handstands, so fog off the Atlantic could run down their backs to their mouths. And I have listened as a Namibian wildlife guide snapped off the pipe-like branch of a Euphorbia bush and explained how the nearby rhinos had evolved, in the absence of finer foods, to thrive on its milky, poisonous flesh.

Namibia has always seemed to me to be a wondrous country, and not just for its paradoxical richness of life in a sparse, arid habitat. Its Khoisan people have long regarded themselves as Earth’s oldest humans. (Recent genetic evidence indicates that they may be right.) And the desert is so deeply rooted in the culture that the national rugby team calls itself the “Welwitschias,” after a straggling desert plant that supposedly cannot die, though it looks as though it already has.

What has always seemed particularly wonderful to me is that, after an armed independence movement won Namibia’s freedom from South Africa in 1990, the new nation embraced an extraordinarily humane constitution protecting both the environment and the right of the people to support themselves by sustainable use of the land on which they lived.

Rhino trackers at Desert Rhino Camp in northwest Namibia (Photo: Richard Conniff)

In the starkly beautiful desert landscape of Namibia, on the southwest coast of Africa, I have followed behind as Khoisan trackers conducted a second-by-second forensic reconstruction of a murder scene. (The victim was a young giraffe pounced on by a leopard half its weight.) I have climbed mountainous red sand dunes to watch beetles doing handstands, so fog off the Atlantic could run down their backs to their mouths. And I have listened as a Namibian wildlife guide snapped off the pipe-like branch of a Euphorbia bush and explained how the nearby rhinos had evolved, in the absence of finer foods, to thrive on its milky, poisonous flesh.

The dominant SWAPO political party, formed from the armed independence movement, seemed, when I have visited over the years, to be following through on these commitments. With an area roughly equal to Texas and Louisiana combined, Namibia put more than 20 percent of its land under the control of community conservancies — clusters of subsistence farmers — who began to develop local economies based on wildlife tourism. Another 17 percent of the land area went into national parks. Wildlife populations soared as a result — tripling the elephant population, for instance, and almost doubling the number of mountain zebra, even as wildlife sharply declined elsewhere in Africa.

In a 2014 New York Times article, at the height of the rhino poaching crisis, I described Namibia as “just about the only place on earth to have gotten conservation right for rhinos and, incidentally, a lot of other wildlife.” For its people, too. Conservancy partnerships with tourism lodges and trophy hunting outfitters were already bringing new income to some of Namibia’s poorest and most remote communities. (In a rudimentary office somewhere between Palmwag and Kamanjab, the business manager for the local conservancy once proudly showed me how she totted up that year’s income on an Excel spreadsheet.)

But something has changed in Namibia. (Read the rest of this entry.)

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