After mating season, much a male duck’s penis withers away, only to grow anew when it’s times to produce babies again. Sounds dreadful, sure, but it’s also a chance to get a larger dong. But how big their members become is directly tied to the endowment of the ducks they hang around with.
A drake’s penis substantially wastes away at the end of one breeding season and then regrows as the next season begins. Among lesser scaup and ruddy ducks, the regrowth varies in length or timing depending on whether males have to compete with a bunch of other guys, said Patricia Brennan of Yale University. Her new measurements offer the first evidence in vertebrates that social circumstances influence penis growth, she reported July 29 at the annual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society.
In many bird species, males don’t grow specialized organs to deliver sperm. Ducks typically do, their penises sometimes reaching considerable lengths (9.8 inches for a ruddy duck, more than half its body length). That extra length may give a male a competitive advantage in delivering sperm when females have multiple mates. Brennan’s past research has documented strong sexual conflict in ducks, with males forcing copulation and females employing strategies such as corkscrew-shaped vaginas, developed over the course of duck evolution, that apparently thwart male control of reproduction.
So what happens if you’re a guy duck and you’re not facing down other men for lady love? Expect your penis to be 15-25 percent shorter than ducks in a more competitive pond.
See, straight guys? Sometimes it pays to surround yourself with other fellas.
[Wired]
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PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS
I am very ascared where the comments on this thread are gonna go…….. :p
Ickfactor
Did you really have to put up that picture of what I assume is the ducks ……. thanx queerty. Not much can make me gag (insert joke here) but you just did. LMAO
S
I recognize Queerty isn’t trying to compete with the New York Times, but this has to be among the lamest “stories” I have ever seen on the site.
PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS
@S: Why I would go so far as to call it journalistic quackery!!! :-p
Samwise
“Forced copulation”? Oh man, I used to think ducks were cute. Now I find that they’re all a bunch of rapists? Well, no more breadcrumbs for THEM.
Phil
In the animal kingdom, it’s mostly “hey gotta rape as much as I can so I can make sure my genetics lives on.” Dolphins rape, and they don’t even rape for that. They rape for FUN. AND! AND! they’re racist rapers. Only other species dolphins. Then there’s the beetle that developed a pincer that bypasses the beetle vagina all together and just rapes the ovaries. Animals are horrible, horrible people. (And no, that was not a Freudian slip.)
Shanti
Great article, except for the ‘straight’ guys reference at the end.
Shanti
@Shanti: Oops! Never mind my comment. Being too much of a literal thinker today. Sorry.