Associate Professor Andrew Durso

Doesn't come out to female until she has babies.

Doesn't come out to female until she has babies.

So he guarantees she can't mate a second time.

So he guarantees she can't mate a second time.

It is very complicated, actually.

It is very complicated, actually.

So when he catches up to her, then typically there begins a courtship process where he would rub...

Her back.

That's one of their flirtation behaviors.

In some species, there might be a little bit of cloacal tickling and certain species that have vestigial hind limbs.

There's a little bit of spur tickling in the cloacal region.

And you know, if the female's impressed, then she'll lift up her tail and expose her cloaca and then the

The hemipene everts goes inside the cloaca and they can stay intromitted like that for several hours.

I think in some cases it's been documented over 24 hours.

It doesn't seem that pleasurable for them, honestly, because a lot of time the female would be like dragging the male around by his hemipenes.

There was this observation by a woman in South Africa who found an African house snake female who was mating with two males simultaneously.

She was dragging both of them around by their hemipenes.

I have a video of it that I could send you.

There is what we call traumatic insemination, which is not only the penis is spiking and hurts the female in the process of anchoring and trying to transfer as much sperm as possible, but the penises sometimes have structures that will allow the male to pierce the female and inject sperm sometimes outside the reproductive tract.

There is what we call traumatic insemination, which is not only the penis is spiking and hurts the female in the process of anchoring and trying to transfer as much sperm as possible, but the penises sometimes have structures that will allow the male to pierce the female and inject sperm sometimes outside the reproductive tract.