Photo: rohojamagic (Getty)
No word if they’re getting the dead dolphins drunk first.
According to Newsweek, a team of researchers at Dalhousie University in Canada led by Dara Orbach, are actually inflating dead dolphin dicks to fake sex with dead dolphin vaginas in an effort to understand dolphin reproduction.
Their findings so far? You guessed it – they’re a “tight fit.”
“We were basically looking at two identical structures,” Orbach said. “This is coevolution at its finest.”
Coming to that “tight fit” conclusion was a rather “tricky” process, as Orbach and her team were dealing with a “very different penis type” compared to humans and other mammals.
“It’s full of tough elastin tissue, so it’s very resistant to bending,” Orbach said.
To get around that, she and her colleagues turned to the the same nitrogen “that is pressurized to put bubbles in a Guinness or a nitro brew coffee” and then pressurized salt water with enough force to inflate each dead cock. Once they were able to pump a little life into the little guys, here’s what they were able to take away:
“Short-beaked common dolphins and harbor seals have fairly straightforward penises and vaginas. But in harbor porpoises and common bottlenose dolphins, the penises featured bent tips and the vaginas hid dead ends that seemed to trap the penises if they weren’t inserted at precisely the right angle. To Orbach, that reeks of reproductive tension between males and females—with the vaginal folds serving as a sort of escape hatch for a female mating with a male she doesn’t quite believe is offering her healthy genes. If the female harbor porpoise or bottlenose dolphin twists just a little, the penis tip won’t be able to reach as close to her eggs, reducing the probability her mate will become the father.”
So it appears as though female dolphins have that going for them, which is nice.