Animal porn: Twitter accounts of biologists offer graphic lessons on animal reproductive systems
Because of the pervasiveness of porn on the Internet, how a human female or male genital looks like is offered across different Web sites. However, for the intellectually curious but with inquisitive minds on what the vagina or penis of animals look like, the answer is in … Twitter!
Gizmondo reports of a trend on Wednesday morning in the microblogging site, using the hashtag #JunkOff, which shows photos of the reproductive organs of different animals and insects posted by biologists. Employees of Virginia Tech’s Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation started the trend.
It started on Tuesday night when Marcella Kelly, research supervisor, and her staff, Chris Rowe, posted images of animal genitals on the Twitter account of the lab @Whapavt. Biologist Anne Hillborn added some photos, and the image of a zebra with an erection caught the attention of a follower who called the photo a junk-off that led to the hashtag.
Similar to the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge that became viral because it was posted on social media portals, Hillborn dared her colleagues as well as other biologists to posts their own photos. Entomologists and malacologists responded right away to Hillborn’s challenge.
Alex Wild posted the image of a Protanilla ant with a hairy testicle twice the size of its erect penis. Snails are known to be slow, but few people – until now – knew that the male whelk’s white organ, when aroused, is almost as long as the snail’s body, shows the post of Carina Gsottbauer.
Insects appear to have unusual genitals. The photo posted by Catherine Scott of a black widow spider shows its corkscrew-shaped emboli that has tips that break off inside the female’s reproductive tract. On the other hand, Christopher Schmitt shared the photo of clitoris of a Central American spider monkey (Ateles geoffroyi).
Even plants were included as Deez Weedz posted a violet-colored fireweed with “junks” that were “engorged enough to make some mammals jealous.” And the phallus mushroom, based on an image posted by Kathleen Treseder, like a male human, had a morning hard-on upon waking up at 9 am that becomes flaccid at noon.
Interestingly, Burmese pythons, like other snakes, crawl on their belly for lack of limbs, but it turned out that it could even do the “YMCA dance with their man-tackle,” tweets Rob O’ Sullivan. And Adriana Lowe shares a photo of herself sitting on a felled tree trunk, while two primates photobomb her as the female, Beni, shows her swelling behind, indicating she is sending sex signals to the male primate at her back.
In a tweet, Jason Goldman shares that the #JunkOff collection is not complete without mentioning the gynosome. It is a cave-dwelling Brazilian insect in which the female uses a specialised sex organ to penetrate the male. That erectile “penis-like” structure of the female insect that belongs to the genus Neotrogla is called gynosome, reports Animals.io9.com.
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