During mating sessions that can last for two to three nonstop days, the female penetrates the male and uses her genitals to collect sperm rather than deliver it. The female’s erect, curved protrusion is called a gynosome. During sex, the male still ejaculates, but inside his own body instead of hers. When the female penetrates the male, he delivers sperm into a duct in her gynosome, which leads to a storage organ. Because Neotrogla sex is a marathon, the mating pair have to anchor themselves. The female inflates the base of her gynosome, which is covered with tiny spines, inside the male, and it’s impossible to separate a mating pair without killing the male.
The multi-national team that discovered the Neotrogla won the Ig Nobel Prize for biology in 2017 for their paper, Female Penis, Male Vagina, and Their Correlated Evolution in a Cave Insect.
Who Runs the World?
Shaking up traditional gender roles isn’t exclusive to insects but can also be seen in the committee-assembled critter that is the spotted hyena. Unlike with most mammals, the top tier of the social order is held by females, by dint of being significantly more muscular and aggressive than the males. Males rank below all the females and even the cubs. Their social standing can only change if a male above them dies or if another male joins their pack, as the newbie is automatically assigned the lowest rank, but they can never rise above the females. Female spotted hyenas are so masculine that they develop a pseudo-penis, complete with false testicles and scrotum, which makes them notoriously difficult for researchers to sex, even when the animal is tranquilized. This unique genital transformation comes from a prenatal infusion of androgen, a male sex hormone. Not every female gets the same hormone boost, though.
Researchers in Kenya who studied the spotted hyena for nearly two decades discovered that high-ranking females give their fetal pups higher levels of androgen in the final stages of pregnancy than lower-ranking females do. This means that the mother’s rank in the pack could directly affect her offspring’s physical traits beyond what her genes do. In packs of forty or more individuals who scavenge to survive, aggressiveness and muscle mass are good traits to have. The extra androgen helps increases the likelihood that the genes of a more aggressive female will survive. It comes at a cost, though. The androgen that the fetal females receive damages their ovaries, making it more difficult to conceive when they are mature. The androgen is also what causes the female spotted hyena’s genitals to change, a lot. The clitoris elongates to protrude anywhere from seven to twenty-three inches (or eighteen to fifty-eight centimeters) from her body, hanging down from her belly like a male penis. The only visual difference between the pseudo-penis and an actual penis is the shape of the tip—blunt on females and pointed on males. This pseudo-penis can become erect and female hyenas even urinate through them. The spotted hyena clitoris isn’t the same as the clitoris of a human; theirs also contains the birth canal.
Mating is a complex cluster of social protocol and acrobatics. Sex can only happen if the female retracts her pseudo-penis, meaning there is no way for a male to forcefully copulate, even if he somehow managed to physically overcome the female. In what is likely nature’s way of encouraging genetic diversity, female spotted hyenas almost exclusively choose males who have joined their pack from another pack. Her estrus, or “heat,” only lasts about three days, though female spotted hyenas show no outward signs, at least as far as human researchers can tell.
The female spotted hyena chooses her mate, then leads or chases the smaller male to a secluded spot. She needs safety more than privacy. Research on captive hyenas at the University of California, Berkeley, has shown that the glans of the male’s penis swells in the female’s reproductive tract after the male ejaculates, causing a “copulatory lock,” as happens with domestic dogs. This leaves the mating couple vulnerable to larger predators like lions, so, as in real estate, spotted hyena mating is all about location, location, location.
The female spotted hyena then stands still and lowers her head, her way of saying, “I promise I won’t bite you, for a few minutes…probably.” Cooperation only goes so far; the male still has the comparatively tricky task of getting his penis into the opening of the female’s retracted pseudo-penis. Careful positioning is required for the male to crouch behind her and, with a bit of hopping, somehow get his penis to point up and backward to enter her clitoris. It takes time and practice to get it right, and the inexperienced male can try the female’s patience.
As hard as mating might be for the male spotted hyena, the real difficulty comes four months later for the female. She must delivery her cubs, usually two or three in a litter, through her pseudo-penis. The birth canal is only about an inch in diameter and squeezing a two-pound cub through this narrow opening can result in significant tearing. It’s not uncommon for cubs to become trapped and die, tearing or no tearing. This often leads to the mother’s death as well. Between bleeding, infection, and the complications of trapped cubs, maternal mortality rates in spotted hyenas hover around 60 percent. For those who survive, things get a little easier as the resulting scar will actually stretch more than the surrounding tissue during the next delivery.
But the babies sure are cute!
When you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. This philosophy is okay when it comes to loading the dishwasher, but maybe not when you are trying find the cause of venereal disease. No one told that to John Hunter. Medical types in the eighteenth century medical believed gonorrhea and syphilis were caused by the same pathogen. Hunter injected himself with gonorrhea to test the theory. He contracted gonorrhea and syphilis, most likely from using the same needle to get the samples. His is just one of many sometimes-harrowing stories of doctors and scientists using themselves as test subjects.
Isaac Newton. That wig is working.
Better than a Poke in the Eye
Let’s start with one of the OGs of science, Isaac Newton. Newton had many areas of interest beyond fruit-based physics. For the sake of science, Newton stuck a needle in his eye. He thought that if he slid a long needle called a bodkin between his eyeball and eye socket, his vision would change. It did! He saw different colors and dots of light that appeared when he applied pressure. It’s the same lights that you see if you press on your eyes, called phosphenes. Newton also stared at the sun in a mirror, repeatedly, until the image of the sun stayed when he closed his eye. It stayed for months, in fact. He had to spend three days in a dark room until it faded enough for him to resume his daily life.
Huff-rey Davies
While at the Medical Pneumatic Institute of Bristol in the 1790s, Humphrey Davy studied gases. Studied by inhaling, in case the theme of this section was still in any way unclear. Davy would set up chemical reactions and inhale the resulting gas. One gas gave him a pleasant sensation and impulse to laugh at everything; he had discovered nitrous oxide, a.k.a. laughing gas. Though his efforts were meant to reproduce the pleasurable effects of things like alcohol and opium, Davy would ultimately recommend nitrous oxide for use as an anesthetic. Modern dentists use a blend of 50 percent nitrous and 50 percent oxygen, but Davy was huffing 100 percent nitrous, which is probably why he enjoyed it enough to start hosting parties where friends would inhale it from silk bags.
“Could You Patent the Sun?”
When it came time to test his polio vaccine, Dr. Jonas Salk decided the only suitable test subject was himself…and his family. In 1947, Salk was working on a vaccine for the crippling disease at the University of Pittsburgh. He needed a healthy volunteer to test it, and administered it to himself, his wife, and their three sons. It worked and the vaccine was soon tested nationwide and showed dramatic results. In two years, cases of polio decreased from about 29,000 to 6,000.