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Echidna penises: Why they're and so weird

"Accept you ever seen an echidna'southward penis?" You lot've probably asked your friends this in jest, but scientists are working away at unlocking the mystery of the bizarre reproductive organization.

• May 24, 2022 • Reading Fourth dimension: 3 Minutes • Print this folio

An echidna'south penis. Paradigm credit: Jane Fenelon

When people start hear almost reproductive biologist Jane Fenelon's inquiry their first reaction is shock, but also, curiosity. "It's amazing how many people take actually heard that there's something weird about the echidna penis," she says. "For those less informed, Jane then follows this up with an image of an echidna penis, and the feelings of shock roll back.

In late Apr, Jane and her colleagues published an in-depth research paper on the echidna penis. Labelled one of the "weirdest penises of the beast kingdom" past Smithsonian Mag , the echidna penis is bright ruby-red and has iv heads. "We're not really sure why information technology looks and then weird but we exercise know that they but use their penis for mating, not urine," Janes says. "Because they don't need it for urine, they had the liberty to make it much more elaborate and this is something yous see in other species that only employ it for mating."

And while yous may think we know all at that place is to know about the echidna, you'd be wrong.

The difficulty in studying the echidna is well-documented. Peggy Rismller, who has been studying echidnas for more than 30 years, was the get-go to discover that echidnas were laying their eggs into a pseudo-pouch, rather than hatching their eggs in burrows similar their fellow monotreme, the platypus. That discovery was only made in the early 1980s, and the reproductive lives of echidnas continues to be difficult to capture.

Echidnas are a protected species, significant scientists such as Jane can't go around picking them upwards and prying at their reproductive systems. And then, for this written report Jane teamed up with Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary on the Gold Coast, which operates a wild animals infirmary. From it, Jane received echidnas, euthanised due to affliction, to analyse.

What do we know about the echidna penis?

Prior to this written report, co-author of the paper, Steve Johnston, had previously published a scientific newspaper documenting how echidnas were simply using two of the four heads at any one time when erect. According to Jane, this is very unusual in mammals but is seen in some reptiles. Therefore, this about recent paper wanted to understand how echidnas were doing this.

The team of researchers believed that the echidna was using a valve mechanism to control which head information technology used. However, the newspaper revealed the two 'corpora spongiosa' (one of the main tissues that brand up mammalian penises) remains entirely split from the penis.

"Together with the split of the major blood vessel and urethra it gives the impression that the end of the echidna penis is interim like 2 separate glans penises, which explains how they ejaculate out of 1 side at a fourth dimension," Jane says.

And then, what'southward the point of knowing these things about an echidna'southward junk? Well, echidnas are notoriously difficult to breed, and while Commonwealth of australia seemingly has echidnas in abundance, Jane says the main goal is to help with the conservation and breeding of the endangered long-beaked echidnas of Papua New Guinea.

"While understanding how the penis functions isn't directly related to their conservation, understanding equally much as possible almost their reproduction in general will help u.s. with that goal," she says.

The next step will be understanding how the unusual structure of an echidna'south penis developed.

"We'd besides like to look into how similar it is to crocodiles and turtles, which the adult class looks most like. In that location's some evidence that the penis in all amniotes [reptiles, birds and mammals] has the same evolutionary origin and the monotremes are a missing piece of that puzzle."