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Chapter 1: Why is sex considered weird in biological terms?
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Hello, Anne Jones and a duck from What the Duck. Just letting you know that the program which follows will be talking all about animals getting to know each other in the biblical sense. Which vertebrate species has the longest penis proportional to its body length? Let me ruin my search history so that you don't have to. It's a duck.
An Argentinian lake duck whose penis, when fully out for a picnic, is over 40 centimetres long, more than 10 centimetres longer than its body. If ever there was a reason to hand in the library card of life to resign from the board of nature lovers, duck penises might be that reason. It looks like Miss Piggy's tail deflated of helium with a bunch of spikes around the bottom.
And when the duck is ready to tango, he can use his lymphatic system to pump up the jam to 121 kilometres an hour. Quick, to the point, absolutely rude. Like an early morning naked jiggly sprint to put the bins out. So how did a bird with a voice like this end up with a 46cm swirling hydraulic penis that corkscrews counterclockwise and travels faster than the speed limit?
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Chapter 2: How did early life forms reproduce before sexual reproduction?
I guess you would say the ancestral state of all of these groups in terms of reproductive style would probably be broadcast spawning, where eggs and sperm are released into the water column.
OK, new organisms, but same old, same old reproductive strategy.
I said direct evidence. Right. We do have some examples of... Fossils where we have eggs preserved, for example, that seems to be by and large the most direct evidence that we get in the Cambrian fossil records for reproduction. Animals that have been preserved, very remarkable fossils, with eggs associated with them, often inside their carapaces where they've been brooding them properly.
Wow. And I do sound impressed because this is a key moment in the history of reproduction. Let me explain. The internal eggs could mark a potential split between strategies to have babies. On one hand, you have lots of babies, but you don't worry about them at all. It's a numbers game. Maybe some of them will make it. Biologists call this an R strategy.
These are the broadcast borders and things that just sort of pump eggs and sperm together. out into the world and just let them hope for the best.
On the other hand, there are K strategists. Fewer babies, but they look after them more carefully. They do a lot more parental care before and or after hatching. But that means that each kid is increasingly important, right? Each individual kid takes more of your resources. So you have to be way more careful about whose gametes you're mixing your own with.
You do not want to be bringing up a nupties son. This drive is what will give rise to most of the things that you hold dear in this world. Dancing to a cumbia, birdsong, being absolutely ripped, diamond rings, colourful beetles, eating a spaghetti strand from each end and coming together. All of this has to do with gamete selection. So back to the fossils.
We've got eggs being brooded internally, right? Which leads me to ask, well, how did they get fertilised? Does it mean that we, what the dark time explorers, are on the cusp of finding the very first penis?
We were doing some analysis on rock collected in the early 1990s.
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