Sorry, obvious typo that should have been Z and W.
They certainly do. However, the males have a variety of X and Y chromosomes and the females only a variety of X chromosomes, although there is some relationship to the Z chromosome. Aha! A missing link!
Everything about monotreme sex is complicated. Like, the males have two penises each with two heads, and the females have three vaginas, two for the two penises and one to lay eggs through.
I detect a fellow New Scientist reader! I was considering posting that here too … !
Bingo! Was that anything you’d been aware of earlier?
… and I thought duck reproduction was complicated.
To say nothing about parasitic life cycles.
If human sexuality is at times indecipherable, it stands to reason on account of everything reproduction related being the ultimate multi-factor tradeoff.
As far as I can tell, while it’s true that male monotremes have multi-headed penises (echidnas have four), female monotremes not only don’t have three vaginas, they don’t have any. They have cloacas that serve as one passage for urination, defecation and reproduction. “Monotreme” means '“one hole”.
You may be thinking of opossums, which do have two vaginas (and uteruses) with a separate birth canal that develops just before delivery.
And cloaca is Latin for “sewer”.
That sounds like some kind of monkey paw story.
“I wish I had multiple penises.”
“Done! But your sex partners have no vaginas! Mwah ha ha!”
Gay guys have been managing to have sex with multiple penises (though only one per body) and no vaginas for a while now. As long as you’re not worrying about reproduction, humans can manage sex without vaginas (or without penises if that’s the preference) just fine!
Three from today:
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur of NPR fame were the uncle and aunt of Hawaii Five-O’s Danno.
The father of the Captain of the Captain and Tennille composed the score for Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.
In Cold Blood’s Dick and Perry were executed on the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.
The Grimm brother’s version is not the original version, though. And it differs significantly from the tale most of us are familiar with. It doesn’t even have a fairy godmother in it.
The Disney film with the fairy godmother and the glass slipper appears to be based on the 1697 Perrault version that was written over a century before the Grimm version.
I’m not sure I knew that, but I did know that James “Danno” MacArthur’s mother was Helen Hayes.
Thirty percent of the world’s arable land is dedicated to growing feed for livestock.
I’m sure there are those who will decry that, but it’s probably more nuanced than a simple “we could feed so many more people”. At least in the case of cattle they primarily live on grazing land which in some cases would have been marginal for humanly edible crops; typically they’re only fed grain to fatten them up prior to slaughter. Hogs allow us to convert corn, which provides calories but for humans is protein deficient, into high quality protein and fat. Ditto chickens.
King George III of England never left his country. He didn’t go to Ireland before or after it was made part of the United Kingdom in 1800. Nor did he go to Scotland or Wales. Apparently he never went to northern England either.
However, he did collect 65,000 books and 14,000 pamphlets.
A non-traveling collector. My kind of guy.
Check out Bonk by Mary Roach for the intricacies of pig artificial insemination. Among other things.
My favorite is the following: a man gets one wish from a genie, so he says
“I wish my cock reached all the way to the ground!”
whereupon
the genie cuts his legs off.
never mind