Anatramy

This article strikes me as really bizarre. A woman scientist has discovered previously unknown facts about female ducks' interior anatomy.

To learn about this peculiar organ [the extraordinarily long phallus found in some species of ducks], Dr. Brennan decided she would have to make careful dissections of male tinamous. In 2005 she traveled to the University of Sheffield to learn the art of bird dissection from [otherwise apparently intelligent] Tim Birkhead, an evolutionary biologist. Dr. Birkhead had her practice on some male ducks from a local farm.

Gazing at the enormous organs, she asked herself a question that apparently no one had asked before [because they were semiliterate morons who weren't aware of sexual dimorphism].

“So what does the female look like?” she said. “Obviously you can’t have something like that without some place to put it in. You need a garage to park the car.”

The lower oviduct (the equivalent of the vagina in birds) is typically a simple tube. But when Dr. Brennan dissected some female ducks, she discovered they had a radically different anatomy. “There were all these weird structures, these pockets and spirals,” she said.

Somehow, generations of biologists had never noticed this anatomy before, [probably because they were afraid they would suffer the fate of Nicholas Schooenhoek, who perished of a severe case of the cooties in 1712, in the first reported case of bird-to-human transmission]. Pondering it, Dr. Brennan came to doubt the conventional explanation for how duck phalluses evolved. [The conventional theory, first expressed in a Nature article from 1954, was that "ducks with, like, huge dicks, totally kick ASS."]

In some species of ducks, a female bonds for a season with a male. But she is also harassed by other males that force her to mate. “It’s nasty business. Females are often killed or injured,” Dr. Brennan said.

Species with more forced mating tend to have longer phalluses. That link led some scientists to argue that the duck phallus was the result of males’ competing with one another to fertilize eggs. [These scientists' persistent inability to notice that the eggs develop in a "female duck-analogue" was parallelled by an inability to percieve cars driven by women, with tragic results in the case of Princeton's Dr. Regent].

“Basically, you get a bigger phallus to put your sperm in farther than the other males,” Dr. Brennan said.

Dr. Brennan realized that scientists had made this argument without looking at the female birds. Perhaps, she wondered, the two sexes were coevolving, with elaborate lower oviducts driving the evolution of long phalluses.

OK, sexism...what? No, really, what? I can just about imagine male biologists being disproportionately interested in the male ducks' apparatus, but even that seems childish and silly. But never even to have investigated the female ducks' anatomy? I think of the scientific labor of dissecting and labelling animal parts as something that was pretty much done in the seventeeth century and certainly finished by the nineteenth; what are all those hand-colored German watercolor plates for? Fine, we know about more species now, but still.

[Highly-functioning moron] Dr. McCracken, who discovered the longest known bird phallus on an Argentine duck in 2001, is struck by the fact that it was a woman who discovered the complexity of female birds. “Maybe it’s the male bias we all have,” he said. “It’s just been out there, waiting to be discovered.” [Don't anyone tell this guy about the human clitoris, either. Let's let him find it allllll on his own.]

Dr. Brennan argues that elaborate female duck anatomy evolves as a countermeasure against aggressive males. “Once they choose a male, they’re making the best possible choice, and that’s the male they want siring their offspring,” she said. “They don’t want the guy flying in from who knows where. It makes sense that they would develop a defense.”

Female ducks seem to be equipped to block the sperm of unwanted males. Their lower oviduct is spiraled like the male phallus, for example, but it turns in the opposite direction. Dr. Brennan suspects that the female ducks can force sperm into one of the pockets and then expel it. “It only makes sense as a barrier,” she said.

To support her argument, Dr. Brennan notes studies on some species that have found that forced matings make up about a third of all matings. Yet only 3 percent of the offspring are the result of forced matings. “To me, it means these females are successful with this strategy,” she said.

Dr. Brennan suspects that when the females of a species evolved better defenses, they drove the evolution of male phalluses. “The males have to step up to produce a longer or more flexible phallus,” she said.

Sucks to be a duck, apparently. Still boggling at the whole situation, though. I genuinely don't understand what it would mean to be a biologist who studies ducks, and is putting forward a theory of why male ducks have developed certain features of their genitalia, and then not bother to check out the female ducks' genitalia at all. That's just...idiotic.

Alternate post title: Ace O Spades does science.

 

Comments

[Matt]

Pretty darned weird genitals them ducks have. I especialy find it odd that the duck penis apparently re-grows every year and then shrivels away.

[LizardBreath]

Wasn't that odd indeed. I had exactly the same thought -- surely there are textbooks with anatomical drawings of dissected ducks dating back to 1830, let alone the modern editions. What, do the engravings go all pixilated over the girl-ducks' crotches?

[belle waring]

oh, Matt, why must you reenact the fatal obsession/incuriousity of the male scientists?

[Mary]

It's even harder to believe that substantially new anatomical work could be done on the *human* clitoris as late as the late 1990s... but search for Helen O'Connell's work and you'll find repeated claims that she was the first person to really investigate the large internal structure of the clitoris... ever. I've often wondered how true this can possibly be, but her press coverage says it.

See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/5013866.stm for an example.

[LizardBreath]

I've read that before, and again, WTF?

[apostropher]

The feminine is supposed to be mysterious, guys.

[coturnix]

Many of us (male) scientists wondered about the female anatomy once the male anatomy was published on, but we could not just go out of our fields to a conmpletely new field in order to test our hunches. We have hunches about every paper we read every day, after all, but have to make a decision what to focus on in our own research.

I was stunned that McCracken never thought of it and then admitted of never thinking of it - he should have been the guy with the scalpel even before his Nature paper came out about the duck phallus.

Almost all of today's biology students are shunted into molecular biology. The rest do ecology (mostly math). Precious few do the organismal stuff any more. Just because the domestic duck was described a long time ago does not mean that every duck species is the same, but in the absence of counterfactual evidence, that is the parsimonious view to take.

[belle waring]

I love the internet. an actual scientist is explaining why everyone was too busy to do this. awesome! (and coturnix, I appreciate your point that reading a paper which seems to have a big hole in it...or...not to have a big hole in it, or something, does not mean dropping eveything to dissect daisy duck. nonetheless...)

[palinode@gmail.com]

Hey, remember the Molly Ringwald vehicle from 1984, Sixteen Candles? There's a character in it named Long Duk Dong. Which suggests that John Hughes was more of a polymath than I'd thought.

[chris y]

Coturnix reminds me that I've often thought there should be a site (probably moderated) somewhere where people (scientists) could post "why isn't somebody looking at X", and other people could respond either: "They have [citation]" or "Because it's a rubbish idea" or "Hey, I'll pass that on to one of my students".

The more I read about other animals' sexual arrangements, the happier I am to be human.

[acm]

well, you know -- the female anatomy is just the same as the males, but minus parts.... sigh.

it is a pretty striking oversight, though. for the record, for those citing decades of anatomical drawings and the like, I think this is a pretty small subset of ducks, so your average mallard wouldn't have raised a question...

[Lillet Langtry]

What kills me about this is one would ASSUME that these male researchers would be familiar with the co-evolutionary history suggested by Charles Darwin: the orchid Angraecum sesquipedale has a foot-long throat with nectar available only at the very bottom -- Darwin postulated that some sort of insect must have evolved with a proboscis long enough to engage with the nectar -- and lo! later on someone discovered that the giant hawk moth HAD such a proboscis. I believe similar relationships were found between other species of orchids and hummingbirds.

Anyway, I'm a musician, not a scientist, and *I* know this shit. WTF??

[belle waring]

The more I read about other animals' sexual arrangements, the happier I am to be human.

so true. some types of female animals just get raped all the time, which I find disturbing. red in tooth and claw etc. not sure why this should occasion more melancholy in me than the whole 'getting devoured live by predators' bit, but it seems unsporting for your own species to do you wrong like that.

[belle waring]

also, I don't feel like enough people are laughing at my "first bird-to-human transmission" joke. I'm grumpy.laugh, internet minions!! aw, heck, I'm going to bed.

[Matt Weiner]

I'm totally laughing, Belle! Also I fixed your link. Having read the caption I'm trying to come up with a Peking Duck joke but it's not happening.

[Weeze]

I saw a duck get gang-raped once in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. I did indeed. Three or four male ducks converged on a female and held her down while one of them did the deed. I stopped dead in my tracks, not believing I was seeing what I was seeing until another couple rounded the path and the look of Holy Shit in their eyes confirmed it.

[Christina]

Ducks are just all around weird. (came from Feministe, btw)

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/story/0,,1432991,00.html

[Christina]

Sorry the link didn't come through.

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher
/research/story/0,,1432991,00.html

[Another Damned Medievalist]

OK, One, that's just frakkin' weird. Two, I don not feel better knowing that the duck sex I thought looked like duck rape were actually duck rape. Three, I'm so posting this shit on LJ.

[Matt]

You know, bella, the reason why I found the the growing and dying penis weird is that I've already read a bunch of stuff that makes the other stuff seem not weird (like works by Elizabeth Lloyd and Fausto-Sterling and the like). But I've never heard about the other thing, and it is pretty weird. So please don't project not knowing abou this sort of stuff on to me. And it's a bit silly to talk about 'rape' in animals, and pernisious, too, since it's a product of some bad sociobiology, really. Again, you might try reading some work by Elizabeth Lloyd.

[belle waring]

calm down, Matt, I was just funnin' you. no offense intended.

[Julian Elson]

It's a good thing human males don't rape human females, isn't it?

[matt]

Next time I insult you remember that it's all just in good fun, too.

[The Modesto Kid]

Touchy, touchy!

[Katie]

Matt reads Fausto-Sterling!

I LOVE Fausto-Sterling!

Yaaaay, Matt!

[palinode]

It's not just duck anatomy that scientists fall down on. In 2003 it was confirmed (at the University of Saskatchewan!) that women ovulate more than once per month. Did it seriously take us until the 21st century to figure this out?

[LMYC]

It never fails to amaze me how human males can be so ignorant of ANY female genitals when they spend two-thirds of their adult lives (they're asleep for the other third) trying to crawl up inside the damned things.

I'm not at all shocked that most biologists know nothing about girl duck cooter. Most of them think HUMAN females pee out of our vaginas. o_O

[fed up]

"some types of female animals just get raped all the time, which I find disturbing."

may I just point out that this would never happen if ducks were more modest in their attire and more lady-like in their demeanour?

[dsquared]

[Dr. McCracken, who discovered the longest known bird phallus on an Argentine duck in 2001]

what a way to make a living.

[dsquared]

by the way, I liked the jokes but if I had been writing it I would haev made some reference to Dr Niels Hoggrut, who carried out the most intensive study to date into the structure and anatomy of the human vagina and who lost two of his fingers after having them bitten off by a particularly lively specimen he was examining in Charing Cross.

[belle waring]

well, that's why you get paid actual money to blog, while the rest of us...

[eudoxis]

"OK, sexism...what? No, really, what?"

This is just too eager. Granted, Zimmer nodded in that direction.

Kevin McCracken is an evolutionary population geneticist. He doesn't do scalpel stuff. So this biologist happens to observe a duck penis that is half a meter long, a rare thing, since most birds don't even have intromittent organs (what, sexism? and females of those species still have cloaca because it's also the intestinal track and wtf does a clitoris have to do with this?) and sees a quick Nature report. It's a half page report that ends with the paragraph: "Many questions remain unanswered. How much of his penis does the drake actually insert, and does the anatomy of the female's oviducts make them unusually difficult to inseminate? The Argentine lake duck offers a sizeable opportunity to study sexual selection and sperm competition in birds."

This generates interest and application for research money and in the normal course of events, the female anatomy is described and in greater detail than the male. Hooray.
What, sexism?

I suppose one could make a point that the male anatomy was reported in Nature while the followup study was published in PLOS. Whatever.

About 1/3 of matings in waterfowl are forced matings, btw.