14 Days of Genitals, Day 7: No Scrubs

I’m sure we’ve all been there. You’ve had the significant other who’s a little needy and can’t stand to be away from you for more than five minutes at a time, or the moocher who wants to crash on your couch all day dressed in nothing more than their underwear and dorito detritus. Maybe you, too, have woken up to someone who didn’t seem quite so bug-eyed and scrawny in the dark. The only thing worse than one of these is, well, all three of these at once.

Such is the curse of the female deep sea anglerfish.

To be fair, that deep in the ocean it's not like they can see anyways...

That cute little flesh nugget there on this handsome lady’s belly is her mate. He’s basically useless; male anglerfish are full-on parasites, with their entire circulatory system looped into that of the female. All they contribute is sperm and backseat driving. Even worse, sometimes female anglerfish can have more than one boy toy attached at a time. While the Vengeance Team definitely applauds the innovative adaptation of polyandry, given that these particular men neither clean the dishes nor offer much in the way of conversation, we’ve really only got one thing to say to our fishy friends:

Have you considered parthenogenesis?

Shoemaker, H. (1958). A female ceratioid angler, cryptopsaras couesi gill, from the gulf of mexico, bearing three parasitic males. Copeia, 1958(2), 143-145.
 

14 Days of Genitals, Day 6: Lesbian Lizards

Sometimes, particularly around Valentines day, it can get a little bit rough trying to find a life (or momentary) partner. Animals suffer a similar sorrow, but some of them have evolved neat tricks to get around that whole  need-mate-to-make-babies shtick by cloning! That's right, Dolly was pretty heavily pre-empted by reptiles, including a population of Plateau Striped Whiptails right here in Oregon. This species (Aspidoscelis velox) is made up entirely of self-cloning female lizards.

Now you might think that clone babies don't have a whole lot to do with lesbianism, but you'd be wrong. Some lady whiptails will exhibit male behavior in the presence of other females, which causes the receiving lizard of the duo to ovulate and thus become pregnant with wee duplicates. Lizards which engage in roleplay are more likely to get self-knocked-up.

Personally, the Vengeance Team is particularly grateful this is not a trait shared by humans. God only knows what chaos would ensue from an Old Spice commercial. While a clone baby of either VT member would be super awesome and naturally gifted in every way (except height for one poor clone), it would be really hard for us to resist pranking each other into pregnancy. Come on - if all you had to do was puff up your chest and speak in a gravelly voice in order to knock a lady friend up, wouldn't you think it was kind of funny? Neither member of the Vengeance Team can really lay claim to the kind of maturity and restraint a world like that would require.

Sorry, Mini-Me(s). It's just safer this way.

Works Cited

Price, A. (1992). Comparative behavior in lizards of the genus cnemidophorus (teiidae), with comments on the evolution of parthenogenesis in reptiles. Copeia, 1992(2), 323-331.

Crews, D. , Grassman, M. , & Lindzey, J. (1986). Behavioral facilitation of reproduction in sexual and unisexual whiptail lizards. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 83(24), 9547-9550. 

14 Days of Genitals, Day 5: Corkscrew Cock

What, not impressed by an animal that will bite off its own penis in an attempt to break up with you, or a penis that can high five? Well, how about an animal naturally equipped to do the helicopter / open a bottle of wine?

#4 : Corkscrew Cock

This is definitely very like something from a "As Seen on TV" commercial.

Why have a dick shaped like a knock-off of the elder wand? Sperm competition! 

Pretty different from this, actually

See, lady ducks have a corkscrew-shaped vagina, so gentlemen ducks have to have a similar shape to, erm, scrape out the sperm of previous mates, as it were. Corkscrew cocks aren't just found in Ruddy ducks, but in many different paternally-invested waterfowl. Apparently if you're going to invest all the time in raising that chick, you want to make sure it's yours to begin with.

Coker, C. , McKinney, F. , Hays, H. , Briggs, S. , & Cheng, K. (2002). Intromittent organ morphology and testis size in relation to mating system in waterfowl. Auk (American Ornithologists Union), 119(2), 403-413.

14 Days of Genitals, Day 4: Mother's Milk

Remember in high school when your teacher showed you horror porn (aka, "The Miracle of Life")? A great scare tactic for both sexual intercourse and ever becoming an adult, because as a 14-year-old you figured anyone who would call that mass of blood and crying a "miracle" was someone you did not want to be.

Well, to put it bluntly, humans have it easy.

For one, you don't look like this.

Caecilians (which are a weird amphibian group that look like legless, massively-uglier salamanders with a permanent sad face) have two life strategies which both really suck for mom. Version A: live birth, with several embryos in the female's tum-tum at a time. This gets really crowded since those babies are often more than half the length of the mother's body. Plus, when they come out they look like this:

And this is its good side.

...which is never a pleasant surprise. That's the Vengeance Team's working theory as to why caecilians are mostly blind. btw: sadness-induced self-harm. But what's even worse is what happens before they come out all wriggly and hideous (a several hour ordeal you can youtube at your own leisure). In the womb the baby caecilians use their specialized teeth to scrape away the nutrient-rich "uterine milk" that is produced in the lining of their mother's uterus. Scientists also found bits of the uterus itself in the stomachs of dissected embryos. That's right,  they go for more than just milk, they literally eat part of their mother's organs.

Version B is also a terrible option, which involved reproduction through eggs. Sure, with eggs  nobody's eating you from the inside out, but the commitment of the caecilian mother prevails: for a week after they hatch, the mother will cuddle her little deviant hellspawn as they periodically swarm over her and EAT HER SKIN. And we thought breastfeeding was weird.

Works Cited

Kupfer, A. , Muller, H. , Antoniazzi, M. , Jared, C. , Greven, H. , et al. (2006). Parental investment by skin feeding in a caecilian amphibian. Nature, 440(7086), 926-929.

Wake,  Marvalee H. Fetal Maintenance and Its Evolutionary Significance in the Amphibia: Gymnophiona. Journal of Herpetology , Vol. 11, No. 4 (Oct. 31, 1977), pp. 379-386

14 Days of Genitals, Day 3: The Angle of the (Slime) Dangle

#3: The Angle of The (Slime) Dangle

Quick quiz: is the below an example of a threesome, or is it technically a fivesome?

If you said, "oh god no, please no," you're correct!

Vertebrates aren't the only ones with strange ding-a-lings. Slugs are hermaphrodites with penises as long as their bodies, and that's only the tip (heh) of the iceberg of insanity. The following documentary describes their mating rituals in detail, and in the voice Meaghan's always sort of imagined a slug having - that of an awkward-ed out teenage boy. Skip to minute 2:30ish if you're just interested in the way things with no bones, well, bone.