by Scientists have solved one of the animal kingdom's most disproportionately large penis mysteries thanks to a Dutch pensioner who describes bat sex in a church attic.
Serotine's bat does not use its unusually large penis for penetration but as a “copulatory arm” during mating, a European team of researchers said Monday.
The researchers added that this is the first time a mammal has reproduced without penetrative sex.
The Serotine bat, with a wingspan of over 14 inches, is common in the forests of Europe and Asia.
Nicholas Fazel, A researcher at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland told Agence France-Presse that his team had been working on the bat for years and observed that its “penis is very long when it is erect”.
GUILLAUME SOUVANT/AFP via Getty Images
Their penises are about seven times longer than the vaginas of female serotine bats, the scientists measured.
Stranger still, the head of the penis expands into a heart shape, making it seven times wider than their partner's vagina.
Scientists were amazed.
“There's no way he could get into that structure,” said Fazel, a New research in the journal Current Biology.
Relatively little is known about how bats mate because it is difficult to observe and scientists have not seen a way to solve this mystery.
But then Fassel got a strange email.
“Bat Porn Box”
“Penis” was the first word in the subject line of the email, followed by something in Dutch, then the word “Eptesicus”.
“So I thought, OK, this looks like spam,” Fassel said.
However, Eptesicus is a genus of serotine bat, so Fassel took the risk of opening the email and watching the videos inside.
“Then I was really surprised because we had an answer,” he said.
The email was from Jan Jeuken, a retiree with no scientific background who lives in the southern Dutch village of Kastenreij.
Jeuken became interested in the population of serotine bats living in the attic of a local church and installed cameras that took enormous footage.
Fassel said Jacken's “passion made him the best guy to understand bats, and the retiree was named a co-author of the study.
The researchers analyzed 93 mating events in a church attic, as well as four recorded at a bat rehabilitation center. Ukraine destroyed by war.
By filming the netting that the bats climbed on, the researchers were able to observe them mating.
Current Biology
Female serotine bats have a large sheath between their tail and legs that they can use to protect their genitalia.
During mating, males grab females by the back of the head and use their large penis as an extra arm to reach around and remove the sheath, the researchers said.
“We hypothesize that the hair on the last swelling serves as a sensor to locate the vulva. The authors of the study write. “During this time, we recorded several social calls that were probably made by the female.”
This is followed by a long, still embrace called “contact mating” during which the sperm are transferred.
Although this form of mating – also called “cloacal kissing” – is common in birds, it has never been observed in mammals before.
For serotine bats, the process takes some time. The average session was 53 minutes, but the longest lasted nearly 13 hours.
“It's a really weird reproductive strategy, but bats are weird and have a lot of weird reproductive strategies,” said Patty Brennan, a biologist at Mount Holyoke College who was not involved in the study. told the New York TimesAnd he added: “I think there's probably quite a lot of strange morphologies and behaviors that we just don't know anything about.”
Fassel hypothesized that female bats can use their unusually long cervixes to hold onto the sperm of several different males for months before choosing which male to sire their offspring with.
It's possible that other bat species can interbreed without mating, Fassel said, adding that more research is needed.
“We were seeing that there are many, many species with quite strange penises,” he said.
The authors concluded that the study revealed a “new copulatory pattern in mammals”, adding that further research should focus on male competition as well as the role played by pre- and post-copulatory female choice.
To better understand the mating behavior of serotine bats, Fassel told LiveScience that he and his colleagues are “trying to create a bat porn box that's like an aquarium with cameras everywhere.”
