Science Vs
When Vaginas Attack!
Thu, 05 Dec 2024 10:00:00 -0000
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[VIDEO available on Spotify.] Imagine a vagina. You might be thinking of a passive tube, patiently waiting for a penis to shoot out sperm — and you wouldn't be alone. From Aristotle to Darwin, tons of prominent nerds classified males as the active sexual players: They're coercing, manipulating and harassing to reproduce, while the females are passive, coy, chaste. But animal ecologist Dr. Tiana Pirtle is here to give us the real story. Because once scientists started investigating what really goes on in the vaginas of the animal queendom, they realized that — far from being docile tubes — vaginas are packed with their own weaponry, tools and secret chambers. It turns out that both penises and vaginas were allowed to fight in the evolutionary arms race. Pirtle breaks open a box filled with animal vaginas to tell us all about it. Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsWhenVaginasAttack In this episode, we cover: (00:00) A Box Full of Vaginas (02:42) The 'Chaste' Female is Born (06:51) The Duck Vagina that Launched a Thousand Ships (11:06) Hyenas and their Pseudo Penises (13:23) Water Striders and their Genital Shields (16:53) Snakes and their Two Vaginas?! (20:28) Alpacas and their Regal Vaginas (25:31) The Rainbow of Vaginas This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman with help from Michelle Dang, Rose Rimler, Meryl Horn, and Ekedi Fauster-Keeys. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Michelle Dang. Video Editing Kait Plum. Additional editing help from Alex Button. Mix and sound design by Sam Bair. Thanks to Dr. Patricia Brennan, Dr. Andy Flies, Dr. Chang Han, Prof. Christine Drea, Samuel Cox and Nick Johnson. We first heard about Tiana's show at Beaker Street Festival in Tasmania. Also a big thanks to the Zukerman Family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you are listening on Spotify, follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. And if you like the show - please give us a five star review – it really helps new people find the show. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus. Today on the show, animal sex. Why so much that we've been taught about it is wrong. The story that seems to have stuck in our heads about how animals have sex is that the male, with their spear-like willy, plunges into a passive vagina. But it turns out that the truth is so much more complicated and so much more fun.
So to tell us all about this is Dr. Tiana Purtle at the University of Tasmania. Hi. Hi. Thanks for having me. And you should really watch this on video, which you can if you're watching this on Spotify, because Tiana brought props. Yes. What's in the box? Well, this very, very special box is full of different animal vaginas. Woo! I may require a stabby implement. Yes. Not a penis. To open.
The box. Oh, my gosh. I've never been sent a box with animal vaginas. Oops, and I might have just destroyed your pencil or your pen a little bit. That's fine. That's what today's episode's all about, isn't it? Whoa, whoa, whoa. What's coming out? What's coming out?
Who have we got here? Well, meet the family. Yes. Let's see. We've got the alpaca, common dolphin, couple rattlesnakes, dogfish shark, harbor porpoise, and a domestic duck. Amazing. Oh my God. Okay. So wait, how, wait, that looks like a penis. How is this a vagina?
So these are all the internal negative space inside the vagina. So how did they make them? So how these got made was an animal died and the vagina was excised from the body and then filled with a silicone. So it created this mold of what is inside. The space that would be inside. Okay. Yes, yes. That makes sense. So the penis is going in. So this is inside. Yes.
So there's some animals with multiple vaginas, some with corkscrews, vaginal folds, long and thin ones. Yes. Thicker, fatter ones.
The array of vaginas in front of me. The story is clear that both males and females were allowed to participate in the evolutionary arms race.
And I'm so excited for you to tell us all about it after the break. Welcome back today on the show, The Wonderful World of Animal Vaginas. And we're here with Dr. Tiana Pirtle. So welcome back. Let's start from the beginning for you. So you were in the middle of a PhD studying evolutionary theories and you started noticing something a bit frustrating in some of the papers that you were reading.
I just noticed there was quite a difference in the way male animals and female animals were described, especially in terms of reproductive behavior and evolutionary strategies. The males are often described as these very active players. They're coercing, manipulating, harassing. And females, on the other hand, are described in very passive terminology.
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Chapter 2: Why is the perception of female animals historically biased?
They're responding, reacting, even like adaptation is what males do and counter adaptations are what females do. Wait, what do you mean by that? So the male is adapting all these strategies and she's only relevant compared to what he's doing. And yes, there's an empirical bias in the way Western science has treated female animals historically. Starting with Darwin, but extending even before that.
So tell me about that. When did this bias begin? Well, Aristotle, in fact, has described males as active and females as passives. So it extends all the way back to then. But it really was solidified by Darwin. He was developing his theory of sexual selection. And sexual selection is the struggle for mates, essentially, in how animals get mates.
Thank you.
formed the foundation for how Darwin viewed female animals, describing them as coy and chaste and the thought that... An animal is chaste. A female animal couldn't be promiscuous was unacceptable, so they just ignored any sort of examples that would suggest otherwise. And it really, A, gave scientific credence to the patriarchy, but also kind of set...
Western science on this trajectory of focusing on the males. They're doing the interesting things, evolving weaponry and behaviors and tactics. And cool feathers. And cool penises. Yes. And the females, on the other hand, are just in the sidelines waiting for the males to do their thing and then working themselves around what the males decide. And the reality is that's not true.
At all. Okay, so you're reading about all of this, feeling scandalized, frustrated. How would we describe your emotions as you're kind of reckoning with this bias in science?
I suppose as you train in science, you're kind of given this line that science is objective. We all like to think we're objective observers of the world and we're testing theories ourselves. in an objective manner, but the reality is science is very biased.
So these models all came from Dr. Patricia Brennan in the US, who's a phenomenal researcher and has made it her life mission to categorize as many animal vaginas as possible because the line that we often think
think about when it comes to penises and vaginas is that, you know, the penis is doing the thrusting, the ejaculating, and the vagina is just a passive tube sitting there ready to catch the penis and let the sperms go where they need to go. But that's not even remotely the case. And they're very diverse in function and form. Let's jump in. Okay, so let's start with the duck.
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Chapter 3: What unique adaptations do duck vaginas have?
How interesting. And so without science having been able to know who was actually fathering these ducklings, you could see why this story would persist. Yeah, it's a great example of, you know, when you only look at half the story, you only get half the story. It's funny, I'm still hearing that males are the coercive, violent ones.
Yes. Yes. So it's not an untrue storyline, but there's females like hyenas are a great example of a female that kind of flips that story. So female hyenas are bigger, more aggressive, dominate the society. And they also have these giant eight-inch long clitorises that work like a pseudopenis. They look exactly like the male's penis. They even have fused labia that look like testicles. Wow.
Oh, wow. But there's no sperm inside. No, no, no. That's just the fused labia. It looks like it. And for a long time, actually, scientists really struggled to figure out what was going on with hyenas because they thought there were only males out there. But the female genitalia looks remarkably like the male. And they use these pseudopenises in dominance displays, greeting rituals.
But it also gives them a very high degree over who's mating with them. It's like two socks, I guess, trying to push into each other. If they're full, they don't go in. So basically the female has to allow the male to mate with her. It's like I've heard it described as kind of like inverting a sock, like gets pushed and she relaxes it and the penis gets to push in there. Oh, wow.
But it gives her full control over what's going on. Is there a downside to this amazing? Funny you say that. Right. This amazing control does come at a cost. So they'll urinate through the pseudopenis. They use it in their dominance displays. They make through it. But they also have to give birth through it. And it's been described as pushing a cantaloupe through a garden hose.
So it comes at a very high cost. I'm clenching. I'm clenching. Yeah. Yes, the pup has to rip through the pseudopenis. Wow. Okay. After the break, we're going to learn about one creature that has a genital shield. I think it's my favorite, actually. It's coming up.
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Welcome back. Today on the show, Dr. Tiana Purtle is walking us through vaginas of the animal kingdom. It's really an evolutionary battle between both vaginas and penises, which when you think about evolution, that is how obviously it worked, right? It doesn't really make sense that only one would be evolving.
Yeah, and also it makes sense that they wouldn't necessarily be evolving in the same direction together always. Obviously, both males and females want to reproduce, but females have to invest a bit more resources, time, and energy into reproduction relative to males. And that's where you get the sexual conflict where the males and the females' interests don't always align. So...
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Chapter 4: How do hyenas challenge traditional gender roles in animal behavior?
Yes. In fact, there are many animals with two. So this is the rattlesnake. So you can see there's two of them. Two vaginas, two uteri. And each one can be fertilized? The males have two-pronged penis, the hemipenes. So they use them both at the same time. The hemipenes. And either one can shoot out sperm.
And then they have the two vaginas, two uterus. So... To clitoris? Yes. Hemiclitoris is what it's called in snakes. Does it give pleasure? And hemipene. So there's been remarkably little research about clitorises, which is remarkable because all mammals definitely have one. And I'm pretty sure... Pretty much all vertebrates have one as well.
And we don't really know what they do for these animals, but presumably they play an important role in reproduction. Because otherwise that's a big lot of wasted energy for evolution. So tell me the evolutionary arms race going on with these snakes.
Okay. Well, so snakes, these rattlesnakes, they reproduce quite fast. Slowly. They're long-lived, slow-growing animals. So I believe they don't become sexually mature until they're about 13. Okay. And they also don't produce very many clutches. So what these snakes do and a lot of other species in the animal queendom do is they'll store sperm.
So these guys have like a special organ that will store the sperm over winter for years even. Oh, wow. I believe there's a tortoise or a turtle that stored sperm for four years. And then produce a clutch from it. Wow, they've got like a little IVF fridge in there.
These snakes, they'll go around and mate with the males they come across. They can be quite indiscriminate because they can keep all the sperm they find and deal with it later. That is amazing. They could store it for that long. Yes.
And then there's some evidence to suggest that snakes, alligators, sharks, all these species that are storing sperm can then select which sperm to use for which clutch. And we don't exactly know how they're doing this, but there's quite a complex dialogue happening between the sperm and the vagina environment.
So the female will mate with a bunch of different males, store the sperm, and then we think when she releases an egg, she'll somehow, using the word choose generously, but she'll somehow be like, all right, well, for this egg, what we really need is this sperm.
We want this sperm. Well, in the ejaculate you have quite a diverse range of sperms. This sperm has crappy genetics. We're not going to choose that one. Oh, this one. It's got great receptors on the outside.
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Chapter 5: What are the reproductive strategies of water striders?
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
What does the alpaca penis look like? Terrifying. It's long and thin and it has a collagenous hook on the bottom. Alpacas are quite unusual in the mammal world in that most penises stay in the vagina, deposit the sperm within the vaginal canal. The cervix will often kind of function as a bit of a a quality control checkpoint and the sperm have to make it through the cervix.
The trapdoor of the cervix, yes. Whereas for these guys, the penis punctures through, the little hook pokes through the cervix and deposits the sperm straight into the uterus. Ooh, okay. Does feel efficient. Which is, if I'm gunning for the male alpaca, good strategy, I would say. Good work, Evolution. Yeah.
And, you know, this is potentially because male alpacas are what we call dribble ejaculators. Hello now. Dribble ejaculators. So the ejaculate dribbles out very slowly. So mating can take up to an hour in alpacas. It's like anywhere from 20 to 60 minutes. And it happens in a very reclined repose. The female alpaca will sit on the ground.
The male will get on top of her and sometimes she'll lay down on her side, have a nap, wait for him to finish his job. And so other species, the ejaculate comes out with force. Get familiar with those species.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, you know, needs a little bit of force to get through the cervix. Whereas I guess, you know, if you're dribbling, you might as well put it where it needs to go. Ah! Of course, that makes sense. I guess this nondescript normal vagina can look the way it does because the female has a high degree of control behaviorally. So if she's not intimating, she'll just stand up and walk away.
Or if she doesn't want it in the first place, she just won't lay down. So she hasn't necessarily needed to evolve all these fancy bells and whistles to stop sperm from getting to where she doesn't want it to go.
Because she can just get up and lay. Oh, that's so interesting. So we find that in the animals, like to go back to the duck, where it is more forcible and the males are really coercing that sexual behaviour, then you have to evolve a vagina that can handle that, that can sneakily... Well, that will give you the final say.
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Chapter 6: How do female animals exert control over mating?
We've had this since Darwin, this very narrow view of what a female should and shouldn't be. Monogamous was the word that Darwin used to describe females. Coy, passive, chaste, loyal, dutiful mothers. But that's not what we see in the animal kingdom. Also, we haven't even touched on this, homosexuality and homosexual behaviors in animals. Very common. And there's...
many different ways to reproduce and be a male and a female in the world. And I think appreciating that diversity in the animal world will hopefully help us appreciate that diversity in the human world. That's right. There's so much diversity within species, let alone amongst species.
Yeah, yeah. And yeah. The patriarchy has had scientific credence for too long from this very narrow view of males and females and reproductions. So when you look at all these rainbow vaginas, this rainbow of vaginas, do you have a favorite? Can you choose amongst your children?
LAUGHTER
But I says, yeah, the duck is one of my favorites as well, just because I love that story. of, you know, the secret weapon vagina and the female has the last laugh. Mm-hmm. So you have this show, Vaginal Vignettes. Vaginal Vignettes? It's had many different names over the years, but this year was the, yeah, Vaginal Vignettes.
Vaginal Vignettes, where you showcase all of these amazing vaginas. What's been the best reaction you've gotten so far? They've all been the greatest reaction ever. What do they say about it? People love it. I've had a lot of women come up. I'm so glad to hear this story. It just makes me so much happier to have a vagina myself.
You made them happier that they had a vagina? That's huge. You are changing lives, Tiana.
One vagina at a time.
One vagina at a time.
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