Episode 23: Cetacean Clitorises: How they were discovered and why they matter

After Episode 22 where we discussed the diversity and evolution of male genitalia, we had lots of questions. One thing we were left wondering was why we know less about female genitalia and what is the current state of this field. To dig into this topic more, Laura interviewed Dara Orbach who studies the reproductive biology of cetaceans with a focus on understanding the genitalia of both males and females, and how they interact. Together with her collaborators, Dara's work has broken new ground on our understanding of the functions of cetacean clitorises.

Episode Transcript

(00:05):
Hello and welcome to this week'sepisode of I Came for Science, a
show about sex and reproduction and inclusion in STEM.
I'm your host, Laura Sarat. I'm a professor of biology, and
I've been studying animal sex for the past 30 years.
Please join me as we normalize talking about sex and what we
know about it, as well as the journeys of the scientists who

(00:27):
study it. In a recent episode, I spoke
with Matt Dean and Dave Hoskin about all of the amazing penises
in the animal world and how theyevolved.
In that episode, we also discussed how we know a lot less
about female genitalia. Our guest today, Dara Orbach,
and other researchers are working to fill that knowledge

(00:47):
gap. Welcome, Dara.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Today, thanks so much for havingme.
Dara is an associate professor of marine biology in the
Department of Life Sciences at Texas A&M University at Corpus
Christi. Dara, I want to start by sharing
some stories about weird female genitalia.
What are some of your favorites?One example that I really like
is the work of my postdoc advisor, Doctor Patricia

(01:09):
Brennan, who's been foundationalin the study of genital
evolution. And what Patti found is that
although most birds have a cloaca, so they don't have a
penis, an intermittent organ, they don't have a vagina,
waterfowl or different and. You define cloaca a cloaca.
Is a central opening where you would have both the reproductive

(01:31):
tract and also the digestive tract would all mix together in
one area so it doesn't have the structures you would find inside
like a penis or a vagina. It's one giant area where feces
and urine and sperm would all come together.
And both males and females have this.
Correct and the way that birds mate is they do something called
a cloacal kiss where they touch their cloacas together and

(01:52):
that's how they transfer that sperm to one another so they
don't have a intermittent organ.So intro going in which is
another way to say penis becausenot every animal has a penis per
SE like fish, they have a different name for them called
the go to podium. So what in?
Insects. We call it Adiagus.
Adiagus. I've been saying it wrong all
this time. So what Patty found is that

(02:12):
males have a penis which spiralsin One Direction, and females
have a vagina which spirals in the complete opposite direction,
which means they don't actually fit together.
And if you think about this froman evolutionary perspective,
most birds are monogamous. You have one male mating with
one female. But what happens if you are are
a male who's unable to secure a female mate?
You still are going to want to mate with a female to pass on

(02:34):
those those sperm inside our offspring.
And so they engage in a behaviorcalled forced extra pair
copulation, which does not soundparticularly pleasurable from
the female perspective at all. So you can imagine that if you
are a female and your genitalia spirals in the opposite
direction of the males, it is not going to fit well together
at the male's forcing himself onyou.
But if the female does want to mate with this male, she'll

(02:56):
actually contract those vaginal muscles and that will relax the
shape of these spirals and allowthe penis to penetrate very deep
in the sperm to have the shortest distance to travel to
fertilize the eggs. That's.
A wafer thing. Yeah, it's a wafer.
It's this genital coevolution between males and females, and a
really fun I think, example showing how both anatomy and
behavior work together as well. So there's something similar

(03:19):
that happens in cucumber beetles, which is interesting.
So it's not so much the shape ofthe genitalia, but males will
take their adagus and intermitteinto the female and she'll
tighten her muscles and he won'tbe able to get his penis all the
way in to where he needs to be to deliver sperm.
And he starts tapping her with this copulatory courtship.
And if he taps just the right way for just the amount of time,

(03:42):
then she'll release the muscles and allow him to intermittent.
So it's very interesting. I was thinking even about
bedbugs and the idea of traumatic insemination and that
the male pierces her female inside her abdomen, but it's a
particular spot where the cuticle software called a
spermalage and it's software thefemale heals faster.
So you have this coevolution over time as well where there's
less damage to the female. And that's something I've sort

(04:02):
of found with my research too. We found that marine mammals,
particularly cetaceans, which isthe group of whales, dolphins
and porpoises, have the most diversity in their vaginal
morphology compared to any othervertebrate clade.
So I'm at a stage in my life where when I get sent packages
in the mail of different species, I can tell you what the
species is just by looking at their vagina.

(04:23):
And we know an insect's penis diversity is extreme.
And you can tell species ID based on on penises, but that's
very uncommon to be able to do that with a vagina.
So cetaceans extraordinarily diverse.
The penises are actually not as distinctive.
They, they, there is variation across them.
And I happen to have studied more vaginas than penises just
because that was my initial research question.

(04:45):
Now I'm looking more about how do they fit together.
I'm looking at more penises. The vaginas seem even more
diverse compared to the penises.And really they should Co evolve
together. So if you're seeing extreme
complexity in one sex, you should see it in the other sex
as well. And so these cetaceans, these
whales, dolphins and porpoises, they have something called
vaginal folds, which are protrusions of the vaginal wall

(05:05):
into the vaginal lumen. And these were first described
in the 1700s and not really thought about since then.
And the thinking was that maybe this was a way to prevent the
fetus from falling out of the vagina, which doesn't make a lot
of sense if the fetus is housed in the uterine horn.
And not in the vagina. And then another thought, which
was that perhaps these were a way to squeegee off the penis

(05:26):
because it turns out that salt water is lethal to sperm, so
maybe it gets all the the water off.
I love that squeegee. OK, yes.
But if you think about it, most of these vaginal folds are
pretty deep into the reproductive tract near the
cervix. If the goal was to keep salt
water out, you would expect themto be right at the opening of
the vagina, not at the complete opposite end over there.

(05:47):
And why would there be so much diversity if the goal was just
to keep water out? And then we also know that river
dolphins, which don't live in a marine environment, also have
these vaginal folds, whereas ourother marine mammals like
manatees and seals do not have any structures like these.
So there's no convergent evolution.
So this got me thinking that maybe these vaginal folds play
some sort of role in sexual selection.

(06:08):
And the whole way that I landed up in this field was really
fortuitous, that I used to be a bat biologist and study bat
bioacoustics. So I've studied sex, obviously,
but my master's was looking at alcohol and most recently I've
been looking at drugs. So I've made my drug, sex and
alcohol and animals, but I used to study bat acoustics and I
knew I wanted to switch to marine mammals because I'm

(06:29):
happiest when I'm by the ocean and really want to spend my life
looking at the water always. And so I went to a marine mammal
conference not knowing a single person there.
There were 3000 people there andI was determined to find a PhD
advisor. And I was going into random
talks that I thought were interesting.
And in one of them, this graduate student said that he
had studied the species called the dusky dolphins in New

(06:50):
Zealand. And it was one of the first
studies ever described being mating behavior in any cetacean
species, which is shocking. But in 2009, we know so little
about mating behavior in general.
And at the end of his talk, he said, oh, and they had these
weird vaginal structures. And being a comparative
biologist, I started to think across systems.
And I have learned that spiders,I heard it a seminar that
spiders in they when they mate, the male taps on the female and

(07:12):
it can force her to ejaculate sperm from a rival male.
And so. Eject the sperm, Yeah.
Eject the sperm. Sperm ejection, yeah.
So maybe these vaginal folds or these vaginal structures and
cetaceans were also a way to control paternity.
And that's what led me down the path of my whole PhD, which was
quite outside the box because other people have not really
been looking at genital evolution.
In many species, especially not in our marine animals, it's very

(07:36):
hard to observe the mating in the best of times because it can
occur offshore and subsurface. And these animals don't
necessarily die close to shore. They might strand in the middle
of the ocean, sink down, or be scavenged.
So there hadn't been a lot of research and I sort of fell into
this field just by going to a conference and having this
outrageous idea, which has has been extremely fun and
enlightening. And I'm so glad that I went to

(07:56):
that conference and went down the journey I'm in now.
And so one thing we found is that harbor porpoises are
absolutely amazing for many reasons, but one is their
mating. So the penis is 3/4 of the males
body length. It comes all the way through his
chin. Oh my gosh.
It's like tucked in normally or.Like in general, because if you

(08:17):
think about mating in the ocean,if you had anything external
like a penis hanging out, there would be drag forces acting on
it. And our marine animals are
extraordinarily streamlined, so their genitalia is internal.
The penis is kept inside the body, and just before mating, a
male will avert his penis. And so these harbor porpoises,
which are thought of as being shy animals that are relatively

(08:38):
solitary, are anything but that.When they're mating, the male
approaches the female from far away.
He comes at her from deep below and always on her left hand
side. And he leaps through the air
when she's at the surface, taking a breath.
So he coordinates his timing. Then he can use the water like a
wall and trap her against it. And he leaps through the air and
he wraps his penis around her body, whelming air into her

(08:59):
vagina at such force that it pushes her out of the water.
It is absolutely amazing. And it's less than two seconds.
So this. Is so many questions.
OK so they don't have like a penis bone or anything.
Is it inflatable penis? It's an inflatable penis.
So it's not vascular like most mammals, it's fibroelastic.
So it's full of tough elastin tissues and very fibrous and

(09:21):
very similar to the closest relatives which are even Toto
angulates like cows and pig, pigs and and sheep.
OK, so when it's not erect, whatdoes it look like?
It's still inside the body and it's it wouldn't be completely
flaccid ever. So it's still as in a semi
target state always, but it further engorges when the animal
excited and it descends quite a bit.
So a lot of the research that I started doing was taking these

(09:44):
dead animal penises and inflating them with pressurized
saline or melted Vaseline to simulate erection and understand
more about their shape. So they can ascend quite a bit
further even after the animal has died over there.
So with these Harper porpoises, we started noticing that they
only mate on the female's left hand side.
We had something like 142 matingevents and every single one the

(10:05):
male was on the left hand side. Did you think to collect those
data at first? Like from the very gecko?
Did you always collect which side they were on?
Or was it like happenstance thatyou started noticing this?
I was very fortunate that I was a collaborator on a project with
my colleague Bill Keener and some folks at the Marine Mammal
Center in California in San Francisco, and they've been
studying the harbor porpoises there that mate underneath the

(10:28):
Golden Gate Bridge. So the porpoises disappeared
during the war because they put some marine Nets underneath to
keep submarines out of the Bay. And when they removed the Nets,
the porpoises started to repopulate the area.
And this team of researchers found that if you stand on the
Golden Gate Bridge at high tide,you can observe Harper corpuses
mating every single day. So food moves into the Bay.
Females follow the food. The males wait for the females

(10:50):
under the bridge because it's the narrowest point and they
ambush the females there. And we, we think it's a stealthy
approach. We don't think they're making
echolocation clicks, which is also really interesting because
usually males alert females to their presence when they want to
mate. There's Carpenter behaviors.
We think the females are caught off guard and they are totally
ambushed, which is really unusual.
Well, there's so much weird stuff going on with harbor

(11:10):
porpoises, but the male's only made on the left hand side.
And what it turns out is happening is that is the only
way that the penis can bypass all these vaginal folds.
And in any other angle of approach, the penis would get
caught on one of these vaginal folds and be forced to basically
ejaculate far away from the cervix and far away from where
there's a possibility of actually inseminating the

(11:32):
female. But if he approaches just right,
which is actually on her left side, he can penetrate the
deepest spiral through these vaginal.
Something amazing also is the penis.
We believe to be prehensile, that males can control them
voluntarily. Someone once sent me a video of
a captive dolphin that was trained to move its penis in
time to snake charm our music. No, it was mind blowing.

(11:53):
So if you have, if you think about it, you have animals with
these very large penises coming at force in less than two
seconds with a prehensile tip. They can navigate through these
little blind end recesses and all these spirals in there.
The whole process is fascinatingand it's this amazing level of
covalent of not just anatomy between the sexes, but also
behavior that males are only mating on the left hand side

(12:14):
because that's the only way to bypass these vaginal folds in
there. And we have no idea what came
first, the chicken or the egg. So did the females have the
behavior or the anatomy first? We don't know.
But the whole process is a excellent example of an
evolutionary arms race to control paternity.
Do females show any kind of resistant behavior?
We have looked at female responses and categorized them

(12:34):
and for the most part, they're pretty mild responses compared
to animals with more contest competition where males are
physically competing with each other.
For the most part, the females might, they might dive down a
little bit or kick their tail flukes out, but they're pretty
mild responses over there. But what I do think females can
do is they can shift their body slightly left or right, which
would offset the penis inside that reproductive tract.

(12:57):
So if the penis is not perfectlyaligned, that means that male's
unlikely to fertilize her egg. And so by slight body shifts in
this rapid one second interaction, a female might be
able to control paternity. So it's not just this passive
female approach. They might have a very solid
mechanism in terms of their anatomy and behavior to control
who fertilizes that egg. It's.
Interesting, and if a male doesn't get just the right

(13:19):
position then the sperm ends up in one of the folds and
eventually gets shed. Is that what happened?
So the sperm could get caught underneath one of these flaps
and never pass forward. It could be exposed to salt
water, it could make its way through.
We know that the vagina in general is a very hostile
environment towards sperm. There's lots of female
mechanisms in terms of the biochemistry, things like even

(13:41):
the pH, which are going to affect sperm viability.
So from a male's perspective, you want to deposit that sperm
as deep as possible, as close towhere the egg is as possible, so
you're most likely to be able toreach the reach that egg.
And do females mate with multiple males per reproductive
bout? Absolutely.
And I would not want to be a female dolphin, that's for sure.

(14:02):
So it seems that, for example, Ido a lot of work on dusky
dolphins in New Zealand, and we'll observe 10 males mate with
a female over the course of 10 minutes.
So it's this constant mating with females over there.
They have a very short estrus period.
So we know that actual time where a mammal is ovulating and
can possibly be impregnated is very, very short.
We're talking a couple days at maximum.

(14:23):
But they are mating for months at a time as well.
So males are trying to time it to be able to know when that
female isn't estrus and ovulating, and to be able to
fertilize at that exact moment in time.
And do sperm stay alive within the female reproductive tract?
Like is there any term sperm storage or anything like?
That probably not. So dolphins have pretty typical
mammalian sperm, which means that they don't remain viable

(14:46):
for a very long period of time. But I know, I know in insects
there's a lot of sperm storage organs, and we're not finding
those in our mammals. And the birds, sometimes you see
the sperm storage tubules also. Exactly.
Yeah, very interesting. I know that some of your recent

(15:07):
research was on clitoris in dolphins, and so I'm curious if
you can tell us like, first justdefine how would you even
recognize a clitoris in another species?
And I imagine it's different if the species is sort of closely
related to humans versus not. And how you go about finding the
clitoris. Why don't we start there?
I. Think that's a long standing

(15:28):
question for a lot of people of how.
How do you find the clitoris? Right.
Yes. The The whole concept behind the
project is that people people would come up to me and say, oh,
you study dolphin meeting, I read on a Snapple bottle.
But dolphins have sex for pleasure.
And I realized that no one had actually ever tested this
hypothesis before. And the idea is that dolphins
are meeting all year round, eventhough their conception period

(15:50):
is really short. And it could be though for other
reasons. It could be social bonding, it
could be working out dominance relationships.
It could be practice. We see calves mating with their
mother often as well. But one thought was that it was
for pleasure, but no one had tested it before, which was.
And yet it was on a Snapple bottle.
Be careful when you get your information.
Exactly. Exactly.
So I wanted to test this idea, and this is something that I did

(16:12):
with Patricia Brennan, my postdoc advisor, and she knows
so much about clitorises. If you think about it, they've
only been studied in a couple handfuls of study of species.
We know very little about them, but they exist in theory.
And all mammals, all our reptiles and all our birds
should have a clitoris. Why?
Because it's evolved like it's ahistoric trait that is in
amnios. So we should find them in

(16:33):
mammals, we should find them in reptiles, we should find them in
birds, but no one's looking for them yet.
And there's a lot of historic stigma I can talk about about
why there's this deficit in research, but they look like
kind of like you would expect them to look in a human in that
they are at the opening of the vagina and they are sticking out
a little bit as well. That being said, the clitoris,
the part that you that we see when you see a clitoris, the

(16:54):
external part is only a small fraction of the clitoris.
The name clitoris actually meansLittle Little Mound or Little
Hill because the majority of it is deep beneath the surface as
well. You weren't looking for it and
all. Tell us about that story.
We could find them. They were very obviously there.
OK. The question was whether or not
they were functional. And so are they just there or do

(17:15):
they actually function in some sort of stimulatory capacity?
And so we approach this in a fewways.
So we looked at where they were positioned and we did this
anatomically. So we found that the clitoris of
dolphins, this is Bottlenose Dolphins, were really wrinkled.
And that wrinkling actually tells us something.
If something is wrinkled, it means it has the possibility to
expand further. When an animal is excited, when
it's important, the penis is full of erectile tissue.

(17:37):
The only erectile tissue in the female reproductive tract is
inside the clitoris. So there's erectile tissue in
there. The animal's excited, it's going
to fill with blood. That wrinkling tells us there's
a lot of room for engorgement tooccur over there.
There's a lot of room for that bud flow over there.
And then we section down that clitoris.
So we 1st 3D scan them. So we stain them and we soak
them in iodine essentially. Because when you do a CT scan, a

(17:59):
convenient tomography scan, theyare great at picking up bones
and hard tissue, but very hard to pick up soft anatomy.
But if you stain them in iodine,and I stain some floors also
along the process, if you stain them in iodine for a while, the
CT scan can pick them up as well.
So this gave us an idea of what the actual shape was.

(18:19):
And we were really surprised andexcited to find that the shape
of the dolphin clitoris is very similar to the human clitoris.
It looks pretty much the same. And it also was not, we were, we
were thinking maybe there would be some changes based on
developmental stage of an animal, if it was a newborn or a
young animal or sexually mature or an older animal.
And we found the only differencewas really just the size.

(18:39):
So it's scaling as you would expect, but there was not this
big difference between newborns versus a fully developed
clitoris. They are they are similarly
structurally as well. And so we started to actually
section them and look in different parts of them.
And one of the things that caused us a lot of delay on this
paper actually was what we foundwas so surprising and confusing.
We were questioning ourselves and what we found or what we

(19:01):
thought were nerve bundles or nerve endings, these nerve
fibers that are 10 times bigger than found in a human penis.
So if you're looking at a human penis under a microscope and
looking at sections of these nerves, you might be looking at
100 time magnification. We were looking at 10 times
magnification and they were bigger than you would find in a
human. Wow.
So these huge nerve bundles and more of them also.

(19:24):
So that tells us this is a very sensitive region.
But we found that we have underneath our skin something
called a dermal papilla, which is a very sensitive region, very
close to the skin. And that's where these nerve
endings are reaching. And we found that they were very
close to the end of the skin in the dolphins at the clitoris.
So this suggests these nerves are going all the way to the
very, very tip of that clitoris skin over there.

(19:46):
So collectively these were telling us that there's a lot of
similarities in shape and structure between the dolphin
and the human clitoris and that they have these huge nerves
which are highly suggestive thatwe have these functional
structures. We can't actually say if a
dolphin is having an orgasm or not.
The way you would look at that in a human might be things like
Physiology you'd look at if an animal.
Is breathing heavier or making sounds or curling their toes?

(20:09):
Dolphins don't have toes very hard to do these other things
underwater, so we'd have to do some sort of physiological test
to confirm if an orgasm were to occur.
But certainly they have the structure suggesting that they
are functional clitorises capable of a feeling these
stimulations. Do female dolphins masturbate?
There is very little evidence ofit.
I think people just are waiting for multiple examples to be able

(20:32):
to publish on it. But there absolutely are some
anecdotal reports of females rubbing against structures and
we've seen males will put their their beaks against the female
genitalia and echolocate into that.
Now you can think about echolocation as a very, very
high intensity sound creating vibrator.
Yes, exactly. So so that might be what's going

(20:54):
on. So there there is.
We think that this this echolocation, females will also
echolocate on each other's genitalia.
So we think that's a form of maybe some sort of foreplay.
Very interesting. Cool.
So early you were alluding to kind of the history of research
on animal clitorises and why it was so understudied, or maybe
genitalia, female genitalia in general.

(21:14):
I was wondering if you could expand on that.
Sure. So compared to male genitalia,
female genitalia has been vastlyunderstudied.
And this is a historic trend which has continued even though
there's no reason for it to continue.
So the historic reasons were that there were more male
scientists than female scientists, and males were more
interested in penises than they were in vaginas.
So that makes intuitive sense. Another logic was that the penis

(21:37):
is external, the vagina is internal, so it's easier to
study something which is sticking out, which is internal.
I can understand that as well. But now we have these amazing CT
scans and all kinds of tomography where we can scanning
electron microscopes where we can see what's going on
internally. So that doesn't hold a lot of
validity anymore. There also is the idea that
vaginas simply weren't exciting,there wasn't diversity, that

(21:59):
they all were going to look the exact same, whereas penises have
all. Festivals to receive the penis
right? Right, it's just this festival
and there's no diversity there. Well clear they were showing
there's a lot more diversity than we thought there was just
no one's been looking for it as well.
And if you think about a penis, like let's take a snake penis,
which has two hemi peens on it. It has a double headed penis.

(22:20):
Well, the vagina is going to have double heads as well.
Same with our kangaroo. So if you're finding these
things in males, it's pretty safe to assume you're going to
find the same level of a match in terms of anatomy because
they've Co evolved together in those females.
So that was one part to it that it was just assumed that they
weren't going to be variable. But then I think the biggest
actor just had to do with socialstigma and the idea that it was
considered a social faux pas to talk about female reproductive

(22:42):
anatomy. Even now, if you think about
your junk mail and your spam mail, you're getting emails
constantly for different things to enhance erections.
But you're not getting differentspam mail about polycystic
fibrosis or other other female genital diseases.
It's all about how to increase erections and male fertility.
There's just not that same levelof equality within our society.

(23:02):
Would we consider talking about penises even in slaying?
There's so many words to say penis, but very few to say
vagina in comparison. So in the 1990s, this researcher
named Pedergas was the first oneto characterize vaginal
diversity in humans, and she showed that humans have slight
differences in vaginas. And she was called a dirty old
woman like she was socially called some sort of pariah for

(23:24):
even looking at these sort of questions.
Perverted all the things. Exactly, which is crazy to think
about that there was no need at the time or thought why you
would ever look at female vaginal diversity.
And I can think of an example myown life where I was going to do
some research on penises and vaginas.
And I was doing this in a foreign country, I won't mention
which one. But I had talked to a university

(23:44):
there and had asked to suspend their penises from their
ceilings of a laboratory so I could 3D scan them and digitize
them as you do when you're me. And the person I was talking to
got back to me and said, well, we have female students and I
think they would be very offended to look in a window and
see a penis hanging there. And I reminded them that if I
were studying something like a toe pad of a gecko, probably
they wouldn't be objecting, but that we are inherently having

(24:07):
this bias against genitalia justbecause it's genitalia.
Squamish evaluating the science,even though there's the same
validity and same need for rigorous science to to find
patterns there. You get that in a lot of ways
and. We're still, we're still.
I mean, the name for the clitoris.
So one of the things that it used to be called was the little
hill or the little mound. But another name for it was the
shameful member. It was just shameful to talk

(24:29):
about female genitalia. And if you think about most
organs in in our body, there is a National Institute of most
organ systems in the US, but nota National Institute for female
genitalia that falls under children.
So we're just not where we need to be yet.
But I think conversations like these are so important to help
these stigmatize topics like talking about genitalia using

(24:49):
appropriate words as opposed to some sort of euphemism.
We need to call anatomy anatomy and bring the conversation
forward, advance it to get to a stage where we can talk about
genitalia. And even now, female genitalia
are still understudied compared to male genitalia.
So even though we've gone through all these other reasons
and there's no rationale now, westill study penises more than
vaginas. And interestingly, we say male

(25:09):
and female as opposed to female and male.
All the time, yes. I'll catch myself.
I catch myself. Yeah.
Anymore. I know.
I catch myself. And I change it.
The one of my students was wondering how knowledge from
dolphin research on female genitalia could be applied to

(25:31):
understanding humans or other species, or for conservation.
Are there some ways that it can be applied in that way?
Absolutely. And that's exactly what we're
doing in my lab and something I'm very excited about.
We've been using dead dolphins and casting their vaginal shapes
because cetaceans have these super complicated reproductive
tracts, so they're a good model system.
We cast their vaginas and we usethose to 3D print and then to

(25:53):
digitize and do all these crazy different things with silicone.
And we make these bio inspired artificial vaginas which
simulate the natural shape and elasticity of a real dolphin
vagina. And these are being used by
trainers to try to improve ejaculate quality.
If you use something which feelslike a vagina, do you improve
ejaculate? And the answer so far seems to
be yes. And this is a game changer when

(26:14):
you think about it, because we have lots of animals which are
endangered and there are programs where they're trying to
breed them and repopulate them in the wild.
And if we can actually find a way to increase the success of
artificial insemination, we havea way to help with conservation,
to help a lot of species. And so a lot of research on
artificial insemination focuses on how do you best preserve the

(26:35):
semen and preserve the sperm once you've collected it, How do
you cryopreserve it? How do you thought what process
is going to how do you actually inseminate it?
But there's very little researchin the past several decades on
how do you improve the quality at the time of collection.
So if you're starting with a better quality sperm to begin
with, you're increasing your likelihood that that sperm is
going to actually fertilize an egg.
So we're excited about where thepotential for this research is.

(26:58):
It could even go towards things like the agriculture.
Think about cows and pigs and all these animals that we're
consuming. If we can find a way to produce
faster and more rapid breeding of these animals, this has a lot
of value towards society. Right, and all sorts of species.
This artificial. Insemination is used for
conservation breeding. We actually just talked to

(27:18):
another person, Mcmartin, about conservation breeding, but we
didn't talk about the ejaculate aspects of it.
So it really ties in. You could imagine doing that for
a lot of different species if you can train the males to use
these artificial. Dolphins are Dolphins are very
happy to ejaculate and to be trained to ejaculate.
That's apparently they're easierto train the most species.
How the heck do you do that? Do you know?
It's a gradual. I have not personally trained

(27:40):
them well. I'm told that it's relatively
easy to other animals and it's agradual process where the male
will have an erection on his ownvolition and you positively
reinforce that. And then you put objects
touching the penis until it becomes associated that there's
a command to have that erection.So all these dolphins that we're
working with at many facilities are voluntarily providing the

(28:00):
semen. It's nothing anesthetized.
Yeah. Nothing shocked, Electro
ejaculated or anything like that.
That is super cool. Yeah.
We're really excited about wherewe can go with this research.
So it's exciting times ahead. Yeah, absolutely.
What other future research are you excited about?
We are currently working on someprojects trying to look at

(28:21):
different human contaminants inside sperm and that's
something that we. Don't think about.
A lot. OK, so we've done this is my and
by we, I mean my PhD student, the Royal.
We has done an amazing job with this, but we understand a lot of
that hormones inside sperm and we know a little bit about some
contaminants, but no one's ever looked for pharmaceuticals

(28:42):
inside sperm before. So we know there's microplastics
possibly in sperm because microplastics are everywhere in
the world. But what exactly is entering our
body and is landing up inside our sperm?
And that's something we're trying to understand now.
And in recent advances in mass spectrometry have really made it
possible to do these various essentially assays and look at
thousands of chemicals and compounds at once and look for

(29:04):
matches in there. So we have been working very
diligently on figuring out what weird hormones that you wouldn't
expect to find and what human pharmaceuticals and pesticides
and other pollutants are there, and it all started.
Specifically in dolphin sperm, right not.
Right. I'm working with dolphin sperm,
but this could be expanded. Sure.
You have the protocol? We could expand this to any
species. And it started because I was

(29:24):
having a talk with a friend of mine while we were walking on
the beach and she said is the reason people are tired after
sex because of all the melatoninand sperm.
And I said, what are you talkingabout?
I had no idea there was melatonin in the human sperm.
And this got me thinking, well, what other hormones are in sperm
that you wouldn't think would bethere?
And what are they in? Sperm or is it in the Seminole
fluid? I believe it's in the Seminole.

(29:46):
Seminole Fluid. OK, it's in the semen, Yeah.
In the semen, yeah. What we're looking at now is
we're actually looking at samples.
We're separating the sperm from the Seminole plasma and looking
at all these different combinations to figure out where
these different compounds are found.
Is it in the sperm or is it inside the Seminole plasma?
Gotcha. But if you think about hormones,
you wouldn't expect to find melatonin intuitively inside

(30:06):
sperm. So now we're looking at a whole
suite of really unusual hormonesand seeing what we're finding
there. How do you take a vaginal swab
on a dolphin? It's not as hard as I've seen
videos. I'm the researcher just sending
out the protocol and sharing supplies and sending the money.
But I've watched the videos and the females are trained to
invert their bodies so that their bellies are near the
surface. And the trainers will dry the

(30:27):
surface area and then stick whatlooks essentially like a cotton
swab that's very long inside thefemale and swirl it around and
then pull it out, cut that off. And then we stick it in a
solution which is going to preserve all the DNA in there.
But I'm having a lot of fun withthe research that we're working
on these days. There's seems to be a Sky's the
limit, possibly because there's so much which simply has not
been done and especially in our larger animals a lot less has

(30:50):
been done compared to some of our smaller lab based animals.
When I was talking to David Huskand he was talking about how
little had been done on females and I think he was talking about
his own choices to study male genitalia rather than female for
the most part, and said this is going to sound like the ultimate
cop out, but it was just hard, right, to study females.
But that's what you're saying. Like, yeah, it's hard, but it's

(31:11):
easier now. And and it's not that hard that
it's very doable and. I've had male collaborators say
to me like, you can do it because you're a young female,
but if me and old creepy male were to do this or not an old
creepy male, but if an old male were to do this, there might be
more stigma. You can do things because you're
young and female. I don't know if that's true, but
it certainly is. No shortage of questions, no

(31:32):
shortage of opportunities. Most animals out there, we know
very little about their vaginal morphology, about the clitoris
morphology, about their cellularstructure, molecules.
There's just so many. We didn't even know what the pH
of vagina wise before. My PhD students are working on
these things, like some things which seem to be so intuitive
that dolphins have sex for pleasure.
Do they have sex for pleasure? These are all the sort of

(31:53):
questions that we're trying to answer now, these basic
fundamental questions. And it's, it really gets me
thinking about how much we take for granted or assume that we
know everything there is to knowabout anatomy.
We are missing a lot of the basics, yeah.
And it's interesting, I find people are more comfortable
talking about the sex lives and the sexual anatomy, reproductive
anatomy of other animals than humans.
So it always this makes me think, oh, we should just do

(32:16):
stealthy sex Ed in places that are prohibiting accurate sex Ed
in schools. Like, yes, go to schools and
talk about the clitorises of dolphins or whatever, you know,
like, and then maybe people willlearn that, yes, humans also
have these structures. So I think there's a lot of
opportunity there too. And I think people are also the

(32:36):
world is changing and I think people are becoming more open
minded about the importance. Of these research topics.
So I've been asked to give talksto school groups and I've told
them what the topic is and they said do it, go for it.
Our students are mature enough even though they're only in high
school. These are conversations and
things they need to learn about.So please don't hold back on
explaining the anatomy. And that's really, and these are

(32:57):
including in very conservative states.
I've been asked to give talks like this as well, which is
encouraging. Well.
Dara, this has been a fascinating conversation.
Thank you so much for joining us.
It is my absolute pleasure, I'vereally enjoyed chatting with
you. Great.
We'll talk again soon, and thankyou all for listening.
Thanks also to our production team, Isabel Espinoza, Lane

(33:21):
Patton, and Daphne Trilliana. The music used in this episode
is from I Don't Smoke by the Mythical Score Society.