11/10/2023 0 Comments Dolphin rapeAt present, saving the species's last few members is of much greater concern: An emergency effort to locate, catch, and house remaining vaquitas will kick off in May, but there is no guarantee that the plan will succeed. However, there are no vaquitas in captivity, much less any that are captively bred. It may be tempting to think that improvements to captive breeding could help Mexico’s vaquita, a porpoise down to its last 30 individuals because of illegal gillnet fishing. “If you have a biomimetic (artificial but lifelike) vagina, that could trigger the male to produce higher-quality sperm, as opposed to a different device,” she says. Orbach says that down the line, her research could yield conservation benefits, especially when collecting sperm for artificial insemination. Then it’s off to Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, where radiologist Mauricio Solano scans them in detail. The team then inserts the rigid penis into a matching vagina, sews the two together, and preserves them in the formaldehyde mixture. Separately, they inflate the penis until it’s erect using a pressurized keg of saltwater, and then they preserve it in a mixture of water, methanol, and the gas formaldehyde. She and her colleagues then create a silicone mold of the vagina’s interior. Once Orbach gets matching genitalia, she cleans up the tracts and then exhaustively measures them, collecting 50 types of data for a single vagina. “It’s like a birthday you open up a stinky package,” says Orbach. She now has about 75 tracts-excised during necropsies on the carcasses-in storage at Mount Holyoke College, where she is a research associate. To answer these questions, Orbach set out to collect reproductive tracts, asking NOAA’s National Marine Mammal Stranding Network, which responds when carcasses appear on U.S. Do dolphin penises penetrate the cervix during sex? How do structures on the penis align with the folds? And why? Measuring Genitaliaīut determining how evolution shaped these folds requires knowing precisely how penises and vaginas interact. “It’s a pretty amazing system to be working with.” “All evidence so far seems to suggest that sexual selection seems to be driving this variation,” adds Orbach. “The flaps, folds and blind alleys of the female reproductive tract may serve as a gauntlet that a male's sperm, or that of competing male rivals, must traverse to reach the egg,” Mesnick said in an email. The vagina of the common bottlenose dolphin, for instance, has a single fold the harbor porpoise’s, in contrast, has about thirteen. However, a March 2017 study that Orbach and Mesnick coauthored shows that marine mammals’ vaginas have a stunning diversity of inner flaps and folds. ( This 99-million-year-old fossil preserves an extinct arachnid’s erection.) And science has long faced a gap in the study of female genitalia, fueled by the relative ease of studying penises and a long-held assumption that from species to species, vaginas don’t vary as much as penises. Precise studies of how genitals fit together have been mostly limited to small insects, spiders, and lizards (though at least one MRI study has looked at humans). In the field of sexual anatomy, there’s a lot left to discover. “Orbach is experiencing anatomy as scientists did in the Age of Discovery, gaining new insights with each dissection,” she added. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “With basic anatomy, it is often thought that we scientists have a pretty good idea about mammalian structures and their functions, but this turns out not always to be true,” says Sarah Mesnick, an ecologist at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center, part of the National Marine Fisheries Service of the U.S. The finds also will help scientists see how evolution shaped the organs into their present forms. But Orbach’s work is some of the first in more than a century to reanalyze the female sexual anatomy of marine mammals-in this case, dolphins and porpoises. She presented scans of two species of dolphins, as well as harbor porpoises and harbor seals, all produced using genitalia collected from animals that died of natural causes.Īt first blush, the intricacies of dolphin love may seem risqué. In a presentation at this year’s Experimental Biology meeting in Chicago, Dalhousie University postdoctoral fellow Dara Orbach showed intimate 3-D scans of a variety of marine mammals. Thanks to a pressurized penis inflator and genitals flown in from across the U.S., an anatomist has answered a long sought-after question: how do the genitals of dolphins and porpoises fit together during sex?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |