Echidnas Have Sex Half a Penis at a Time

What do you do when you work at a zoo , at an outreach program designed to give the populace an up - skinny look at the safer animals in your tutelage , and the animal you ’re showing off gets an erection ? If you work at the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary , you get to study .

Zookeepers handling a short - pick echidna took what they had to knead with and conditioned the echidna , over two weeks and out of the public eye , to maintain its erection until it ejaculate . They noticed a couple of left over things along the way : The first was that the echidna ejaculated bundles of spermatozoan , which glommed together in Holy Order to swim faster than single sperm . The second was that the anteater only ejaculates out of half of its penis .

The echidna ’s member end in what biologists poetically call “ four rosettes . ” As it bring skinny to interjection , two of the rosette retract , leaving the other two quick to get the job done . At first the life scientist considered that two of the rosettes might be blocked , but over 10 “ sessions , ” they retrieve that the echidna alternate between pairs of rosette . ( Oh the glamorous life of a biologist ! )

Starship Test 9

This is more than just a weird queerness of Australian biota . The spiny anteater is a egg-laying mammal , a mammal that lays ballock . According to the life scientist observing the echidna ’s behavior , “ This is unparalleled in mammals but is reminiscent of the use of hemipenes in squamate reptiles , providing further reproductive grounds of a sauropsidian filiation in the Monotremata . ” Sauropsida is a big group that include reptiles , birds , and their ancestors . This kind of half - mating could link the echidna , through its root , to creature whole unlike itself .

[ beginning : One‐Sided Ejaculation of Echidna Sperm Bundles ]

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