What do you do on a Friday Evening?! Apparently I Learn About Duck Sexual Organs!

A Cyanide and Happiness cartoon originally viewed and re-blogged from Attack on Tardis‘s tumblr

So I just finished watching a film and was just looking through my tumblr when I cam across the cartoon above. I had guessed that it was referring to a ducks penis but curiosity and wanting to check the facts got the better of me. A quick Google search brought up an article from sciencedaily.com which discussed how ducks have competing sexual organs. The male duck has a large corkscrew shaped penis and females have corkscrew spiral shaped vagina. However the shape of the females genitalia makes copulation difficult and may be a result of attempting to elude forced copulation.

So on a lazy Friday night in I learnt 1) male ducks have a phallus (apparently most birds don’t which I didn’t know!). 2) Male ducks have corkscrewed shaped penises and 3) female ducks anatomy may have evolved in such a way to evade forces copulation. All because of a funny cartoon on tumblr! I sometimes wonder how my brain works.

The information for the science daily article originally came from a paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B and is entitled ‘Explosive eversion and functional morphology of the duck penis supports sexual conflict in waterfowl genitalia.‘ I haven’t read the paper myself but I will do, but maybe another day!