So I sent this to Cecil, but Dex swatted it down in midair and told me to bring it here. Obviously I am being suppressed by the puritanical standards of those who run the various publications The Straight Dope appears in. But no matter. For now, I comply. I bide my time. Watching. Waiting. Someday I shall rise up and have frank discussions of duck genitalia with those censor-happy fools.
Anyway. I don’t feel like typing my question again, so here’s the e-mail I sent.
So. I guess since I’m not gonna get the wisdom of the great Cecil, I’ll have to settle for the dubious intelligence of whatever zoologists, ornithologists, or whatever else hang around in these parts.
While everything said in the article doesn’t hold true for all ducks, but just some species, (and I also haven’t checked every point), I would say it is for the most part true and based on scientific studies. Some species of ducks do commonly mate via rape, and some species have incredibly large and elaborate genitalia.
This doesn’t make sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Since the elaborate vaginal passages of a female duck happens in response to rape and lessens the chance of impregnation, shouldn’t those defenses have died out rather quickly?
If anything, science seems to tell us that the female ducks who evolve more rape-able vaginas would be the norm, as horrifying as that sentence was to type.
The elaboration doesn’t all happen at once. You get a slight elaboration in rape-proofing as variation in one generation, and those males which are able to still mate pass on their anti-anti-rape penises. Thus, there is never a generation in which the males are unable to mate with females.
One of the more famous early columns was on the nutritional content of semen. And I’ve seen the ads in the back of the Chicago Reader. I’m pretty sure “puritanical standards” aren’t in play here, although perhaps one has to draw the line at rape most fowl.
I’m recalling an article (Carl Zimmer? Maybe. There were glass duck vaginas involved.) where the researcher posited that hard-to-rape duck vaginas gave the female some choice on which duck’s sperm to use. The degree to which she cooperated increased the chance of fertilization. The sperm of drakes she wasn’t impressed with could get diverted into side passages.
Also the vaginas were corkscrew shaped in the opposite direction. (This may have been mentioned in the Cracked article, too - I can’t open that at work.)
