Scientists have solved the thriller of one of many animal kingdom’s most disproportionately massive penises because of a Dutch retiree recording bat intercourse in a church attic.
The serotine bat doesn’t use its unusually massive penis for penetration, however as an alternative as a “copulatory arm” throughout mating, a European group of researchers said on Monday.
This marks the primary time {that a} mammal has been documented reproducing with out having penetrative intercourse, the researchers added.
The serotine bat, which has a wingspan of greater than 35 centimetres (14 inches), is frequent in woodlands throughout Europe and Asia.
Nicolas Fasel, a researcher at Switzerland’s College of Lausanne, advised AFP that his group had been engaged on the bat for years and had noticed that its “penis is super long when it is erect”.
Their penises are round seven occasions longer than the vaginas of feminine serotine bats, the scientists measured.
Stranger nonetheless, the top of the penis expands into the form of a coronary heart, making it seven occasions wider than their companions’ vaginas.
The scientists have been baffled.
“There is no way it can penetrate with this structure,” stated Fasel, the primary creator of a brand new examine within the journal Present Biology.
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Relatively little is known about how bats mate because it is difficult to observe, and the scientists could not see a way of solving this mystery.
But then Fasel received a strange-looking email.
‘Really amazed’
“Penis,” was the first word of the email’s subject line, followed by something in Dutch, then the word “Eptesicus”.
“So I used to be pondering, OK, that appears like spam,” Fasel said.
However Eptesicus is the genus of the serotine bat, so Fasel risked opening the email and watching the videos inside.
“Then I used to be actually amazed as a result of we had our reply,” he said.
The email was from Jan Jeucken, a retiree with no scientific background who lives in the southern village of Castenray in the Netherlands.
Jeucken had become interested in a population of serotine bats living in the attic of a local church, and had set up cameras recording huge amounts of footage.
Fasel said Jeucken’s “ardour made him the most effective man” to understand the bats, and the retiree was named as a co-author of the study.
The researchers analysed 93 mating events in the church attic, as well as four recorded at a bat rehabilitation centre in war-torn Ukraine.
By filming through a grid that the bats climbed on, the researchers were able to observe them mating.
Female serotine bats have a large membrane between their tail and ankles which they can use to shield their genitals.
During mating, the males grab the females by the nape and use their large penises like an extra arm to reach around and remove this membrane, the researchers said.
Then follows a long, still embrace called “contact mating,” during which sperm is transferred.
While this form of reproduction – also called “cloacal kissing” – is common in birds, it had never previously been observed in a mammal.
For serotine bats, the process takes some time. The average session was 53 minutes, but the longest lasted nearly 13 hours.
Fasel speculated that the female bats could use their unusually long cervixes to hold onto the sperm of several different males for months before choosing which male they bear offspring with.
It is possible that other bat species mate without penetration, Fasel said, adding more research was needed.
“We might see that there are a lot of, many species with fairly unusual penises,” he stated.
