They have no scrotum and unlike other mammals, they use their penises only for mating. The male echidnas' testes never descend and it is stored internally. The Sydney zoo has not identified its gender yet at this time.Īlso read: Clownfish in Coastal Reefs Could Be Dying From Artificial Light Sources Echidnas Only Use Their Penis for Mating Last Friday, a short-beaked echidna puggle was born in Sydney's Taronga Zoo, Australia, and was the tenth born of his kind. In addition, echidna penis has enough length to reach the female echidna's uterus. It takes 100 sperms to bundle up and work together to reach an egg and bear a small puggle echidna. Researchers reasoned that echidna potentially uses only one side of their penis to attract female echidna and the alternating use of each side allows them to ejaculate 10 times more without stopping, winning over other males like it's a competition. They control which of the other half of their penis is erect by directing blood flow to one side. Fenelon and her team found that only two of the four glans become functional during erection. University of Melbourne developmental biologist Jane Fenelon told ScienceAlert that the mammal merges together two of its penises and uses them independently. Technically, echidnas believe that they only have two penises.
PRESTON, ENGLAND - JULY 20: A stuffed echidna sits in the laboratory of Natural History Conservator Lucie Mascord, of Lancashire Conservation Studios as part of a the major conservation and preservation project for The Grant Museum of Zoology on Jin Preston, England.Īustralia has indeed proven its wildlife wonders as a home to the rarest of species, from biofluorescing mammals that lay eggs and sweat milk to echidnas with four-tipped monstrosity. Other species, meanwhile, have had to make do with what the researchers called “the standard penis design.(Photo : Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images) “By alternating the use of each side, our tame echidna can ejaculate 10 times without significant pause, potentially allowing him to out-mate less efficient males,” they wrote in an article for the University of Melbourne’s research site Pursuit.Įchidna penises also may have evolved with some extra bells and whistles because they didn’t have to operate as both a sperm railroad and a urine dispensing service. The researchers suggest that it could be a mating advantage-not necessarily because it’s attractive, but because it’s really productive.
Why the short-beaked echidna has such a fancy phallus is still a mystery. In other words, the short-beaked echidna basically has two two-headed penises. Instead, only one corpus spongiosum operates at a time, so only two urethra branches will stay open, and semen will only ejaculate from two heads. It’s definitely a lot of moving parts, but the echidna doesn’t use them all simultaneously. For other mammals, the corpus spongiosum usually fuses into one branch toward the head. The corpus spongiosum, the penile tissue responsible for ensuring that semen makes it through the urethra, starts as two parts and remains as two parts: one for each pair of heads. In an echidna’s penis, the urethra and the main blood vessel split into four parts, one for each head. (Platypus penises, for reference, only have two glans.) Thanks to a recent study published in the journal Sexual Development, we now know more about how it functions.Īustralia’s Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary often has to euthanize short-beaked echidnas injured while crossing roads, and scientists from the University of Melbourne, the University of Queensland, and Monash University used modified CT scans to examine some of their penises. Another defining characteristic that sets them apart from other mammals is that they don’t use their penises to urinate for that, they have a multi-purpose orifice called a cloaca.īut the abundance of penis heads, or glans, is arguably the most baffling attribute of the echidna. Male monotremes lack a scrotum, and their sperm swim together in packs of about 100. Echidnas, like platypuses, are monotremes-the only type of mammal to lay eggs. Most of the time, an echidna’s penis is tucked safely inside its body, keeping itself clean and leaving unsuspecting passersby to assume it looks like any other garden-variety mammalian male member.ĭear reader, it does not: Short-beaked echidna penises have not one, not two, not three, but four heads.Īs ScienceAlert reports, it’s not the only surprising feature of the short-beaked echidna’s reproductive process.
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