Duck d&%ks at Yale Tom Smith

I apologize for the title of this post, and if you can come up with a more appropriate one for this astonishing news, I would be happy to hear it.  I came across it in this month’s Yale Alumni Magazine, which I must say I have come to enjoy quite a bit.  Of course, it is devoted to how great, fascinating and amusing all things Yale are, but somehow it manages to do that in a way that is not offensive, but actually fairly interesting.  Not to mention the swell graphics, as befits a university with its collection of rare maps, its museum of British art, and so on and so on, until you are just about overwhelmed.  But on to ducks.

It turns out, and I did not know this, that certain male ducks are among the best endowed of all creatures in the animal kingdom.  They are currently the subject of fascinating research by Patricia Brennan, a researcher in ecology and evolutionary biology.  But first let me disillusion you by passing along the fact that ducks do not have penises, not as such.  A penis has urinary plumbing, while what some ducks have does one job, and one job only, which is deliver duck seed to female ducks, sometimes no easy thing.  So in ducks, you call them “phalluses.”  Mallards and long-tailed ducks, whom you may have heard of, commonly have phalluses four to five inches long.  But wait.  They are but little birds compared to the Argentine river duck, whose male member can reach an impressive 16 inches.  Equally impressive is that it reaches this length only in mating season.  The rest of the time it is shrunken to an organ the size of a grain of rice, which must lead to a lot of “whoa, dude, you must think it’s mating season!” type remarks out on the pampas.

You may well wonder, as did I, what on earth a duck, even an Argentinian duck, needs with a 16 inch phallus.  I was heartened to read on and discover Dr. Brennan’s research does extend so far.  Having been raised in Idaho, my first thought was, perhaps this allows the duck to have sex and fish at the same time?   This is not necessarily inconsistent  with the fact that to get around, the duck rolls up its member into an elaborate coil, which, for me at least, and this may be a personal thing, takes a lot of the romance out of it.

But science is not about romance, and the scientist went on to ask what I confess is a very good question.  To wit, what on earth does the Argentine river duck put this thing into?  And here I warn you, things start to get a little weird, confirming my suspicion that a lot of what goes on in the animal kingdom is just wrong, and probably ought to be banned outright.  Birds, I discover, most of the time don’t even have penises, phalluses or anything of the sort.  The just have one opening, the cloaca, for all excretory and reproductive functions.  To make little  birds, they engage in a maneuver called the “cloacal kiss,” which to my mind skirts dangerously close to a kind of incipient lesbianism.  Birds have, in fact, always seemed to me not very, well, you know, manly.  But not the duck.  You see pictures of him in men’s clubs, on L.L. Bean belts, and on ties, and now we know why.

But to return to the point, why and whither the puzzling duck phallus?  Anatomizing the female duck reveals she possess no simple entry way, but has on her part an elaborately coiled labyrinth through which the male duck must find his way, a passage described in the Yale publication as “bristling with detours, roadblocks and dead ends.”  What is metaphorical in Man, the Duck makes flesh.

Now, as someone who has read a fair bit of evolutionary biology, I begin to understand, and the article goes on to explain.  This odd-seeming (to us humans) genital arrangement is the product of an evolutionary arms-race.  Many duck couplings are coercive, where a male duck who is not the female’s regular mate forces himself upon his not entirely hapless victim.  Not hapless, because females evolved detours to prevent fertilization by unwanted males, and males evolved longer phalluses to get around those detours, and so on and so on, until you ended up with 16 inches of ducky love.

Or at least, that is the theory.  To test it, Dr. Brennan wants to observe male ducks in action, and so has constructed an artificial female duck for the subject to mate with, dubbed the Robo-hen.  So far, the male ducks aren’t having any.  The doctor says this is just because they haven’t been “in the mood.”  Pardon me, but that explanation sounds a little gender-centric to me.  Not in the mood?  Give the ducks a little credit.  Here is a proud bird of the pampas, sporting 16 inches of male-duckhood, and you him to do it with a robo-hen?  Honestly, I don’t blame him.