Natures wonders: marine mammal sex (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, April 25, 2017, 21:24 (2556 days ago) @ David Turell

More on this issue:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dolphins-watertight-sex-involves-a-strange-t...

"Marine mammals in particular are known for their twisty, curvy vaginas. Whales, dolphins and other marine mammals also have to manage sex while floating in water, and they have to keep seawater out of the uterus. Orbach and her colleagues wanted to understand how seals, porpoises and whales pull it off.

"The researchers removed the reproductive tracts from bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncates), common dolphins (Delphinus delphis), harbor porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) and harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) that had died of natural causes. They created molds of the vaginas with silicon so they could understand its shape. Then, they froze the actual vaginal tissue and  thawed and stained it with iodine right before their experiments. The penises were pumped full of saline using a nitrogen air pump and then put in formalin to "fix" them in the erect position. The penis was then inserted inside the thawed vaginas. Both sets of genitals were then scanned with computed tomography (CT) the researchers could see how they fit together.

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"The researchers revealed their findings only for the bottlenose dolphins at the Chicago conference; the research has yet to be published, Orbach said, so they are not yet making their full results public. But the images revealed that the bottlenose dolphin penis has to navigate around the female's vaginal fold for successful insemination, Orbach and her colleague, Patricia Brennan, of Mount Holyoke College reported. Diane Kelly of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Mauricio Solano of Tufts University also collaborated on the work.

"'We think that the positioning of the bodies of the males and females are hugely important in terms of the amount of fertilization success," Orbach said. A female might be able to influence whether a male inseminates her simply by shifting her body position slightly so that his penis doesn't penetrate beyond the labyrinthine curves of her vagina."

Comment: These vaginal changes are complex. They could not have developed when the animals took to water. It had to be arranged beforehand or there would have been no way to proceed with reproduction. If the changes happened in that order, purposeful change would have to be recognized. This is a problem for Darwin theory as well as the issue of both sexes changing together. All of this requires saltation by design.