If You Don’t Use It You Lose It–Ducks Engineer Their Own Phallus Relative To Their Social Surroundings

It’s been a while since I have added any duck stories so here’s a good one.  We know now why ducks are not used in lab tests as if they don’t competition, that is the drake around, they don’t grow a very big penis.  I have never really given much thought to a well endowed duck, but according to this study they exist and peer pressure does it for them, up to 15 to 255 with size growing to over 9 inches for some breeds of ducks.  We will be laughing about that last statement for a while. 

Ducks grow their own organs to delivery sperm and when the season is gone so is the organ and it doesn’t grow back until the next season.  Rabbits on the other hand don’t deal with this issue and thus so scientists have been able to grow and transplant a rabbit penis and it worked.  You can read more about that at the link below as they hope in time to move this on to help humans with issues in that area.

Regenerative Medicine News – Fully Functional Rabbit Penis Created That Works

Being my last name is Duck I have this unfaltering desire to occasionally break the routine a bit and talk about some ducks!   As the video says below, everyone should have a duck in their life and maybe we wouldn’t all be so mad with each other, the duck in the truck!  More on the duck phallus after the break.  BD   

A drake’s penis substantially wastes away at the end of one breeding season and then regrows as the next season begins. Among lesser scaup and ruddy ducks, the regrowth varies in length or timing depending on whether males have to compete with a bunch of other guys, said Patricia Brennan of Yale University.

In many bird species, males don’t grow specialized organs to deliver sperm. Ducks typically do, their penises sometimes reaching considerable lengths (9.8 inches for a ruddy duck, more than half its body length). That extra length may give a male a competitive advantage in delivering sperm when females have multiple mates. Brennan’s past research has documented strong sexual conflict in ducks, with males forcing copulation and females employing strategies such as corkscrew-shaped vaginas, developed over the course of duck evolution, that apparently thwart male control of reproduction.

Among the scaup, males competing in groups grew penises 15 percent longer, and sometimes up to 25 percent longer, than drakes with no mating rivals, Brennan reported.

In the competitive groups, a few big males grew prodigious organs as if dominating the group. Other males grew more moderate penises, which started wasting away weeks earlier than those of dominant males or males with no competition.

Thus, Brennan said, male ducks are “prudent.” In a crowd, a ho-hum male apparently doesn’t bother sustaining a big investment in tissue that’s not going to pay off.

Duck Penis Length Depends on Other Guys | Wired Science | Wired.com

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