Plucky Duck

Why is this duck smiling? Well, this little fellow is a Meller’s duck from Madagascar. If we assume that this duck is male, then he’s probably smiling because he knows he has a phallus that’s as long as he is. (Think of yourself or a loved one as suddenly possessing a 6-foot long cock and… OK, so maybe I wouldn’t smile over that. There’s bonus inches and then there’s inseam problems.) Or the duck could be a girl and the surprising owner of the Meller’s equivalent of a 6-foot long vagina.

I say “surprising” because, once again, researchers have concentrated on the male of the species and neglected to study the female. It was already known that the male Meller’s duck grows an enormous, corkscrew-shaped phallus every spring, only to have it fall off in the fall. (Apparently, it’s easier to regrow it each year than to keep something that size healthy. I can see that.) Given that 97 percent of bird males don’t have a phallus at all (they sort of dribble out their sperm), scientists had asked themselves why the Meller’s duck needed such an enormous schlong. As with all things (see any of 20 previous entries on this blog), the answer seemed to be linked to reproduction. The Meller’s duck female may choose to mate with one male duck, but she is often then forced to have sex by other males. Naturally, from a male point of view, the duck with the longest phallus is able to get his sperm further inside the female and thereby gain the advantage in fathering her babies.

Except… doesn’t that seem like overkill? Yes, if the female duck has a normal, short, tubelike vagina. But she doesn’t. She has a vagina that’s just as long as the male’s phallus and corkscrews the other way. And, no… until recently, no one had thought to check the female anatomy at all. (Remember, scientists are the same folks who didn’t care to look into that whole unimportant clitoris thing either.) Behavioral ecologist Dr. Patricia Brennan looked where no one had thought to look before and found that clearly the female Meller’s duck was evolving a longer vagina in a race to stay ahead of the longer phalluses. Why? To control whose sperm got to her eggs:

bq. “Once [the females] 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.”

Then again, instead of doing the coevolution tango, perhaps the female Meller’s duck could learn a thing or two from the female bonnethead shark that gave birth in a Nebraska aquarium—without there being a male bonnethead shark within several hundred miles. A virgin birth. While this seemed like a new occurrence for sharks, it isn’t unusual for many other species. As it stands now, mammals may be the last stronghold of male necessity. You do still need us, don’t you? Even if our idea of a duck cock looks like this?

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