- Hi there, it's me Jake Young, back again on What the Facts
Our extended look into the topics covered on WTF101.
This time around we're looking at the horrifying
nightmarish world of sex in the animal kingdom
where love and war can sometimes be the same thing.
Luckily, we have an expert on hand on the line
to help us gain a better understanding.
He's a research scientist
and an evolutionary biologist, Menno Schilthuizen.
Hey Menno, why don't you tell us about yourself?
- So I study evolution
and I work in a place called Naturalis Biodiversity Center
which is the natural history museum,
the national natural history museum here in the Netherlands.
- Okay, 'cause from the name, it sounds like,
I'm just going to say a mad scientist laboratory
where they're trying to put shark DNA
into the perfect super soldier.
- No, not last time I checked, no.
- So you saw the episode
and Menno, can we talk about the antechinus?
Can we please talk about the antechinus?
I'm a mammal.
We're mammals.
We're fuzzy.
We're advanced.
We're all the way up on the evolutionary chain.
I thought we were supposed to be above
this kind of beserker rage once in a lifetime
mating frenzy, like, we're not salmon.
How common is this among our fuzzy friends?
- Well, it doesn't really have to do much with fuzziness.
It's more got to do with the kind of environment
that this animal lives in.
There's a lot of competition between males for females
so all these males are just using their last energy
to reproduce
and if they're able to do that,
then that's success.
That's evolutionary success.
They got a lot of offspring
and those offspring carry their genes.
- I mean, you kinda described the dating scene in New York
and I have never, okay a couple of times,
I might have lost a limb to gangrene
but it's not that desperate.
- Things that have to do with sex
are the things that evolve the fastest.
For example, in crane flies,
there is a species that has a vibrator on its penis.
Completely ridiculous,
they have a little thing on their penis
which it's like a little comb
and they scratch over it
and it produces tone like the middle C on a piano keyboard
and they make that tone while they're mating.
So the color or the tone of these males,
that doesn't really serve any function.
It's no use to the females
except for the fact that it's sexy, it's being noticed,
because it's sexy these males get more offspring
and that's inherited and that's how evolution works.
- So when I have children of my own,
and they gain my ability to just really kill
a Bruce Springsteen song on karaoke night,
I've passed on my fitness to them.
Is that what you're saying?
- Yes, if it is not something that you learned
but if it's something that has something to do
with your genes,
then it can be passed on to your offspring
and they can have the benefit
or the disadvantage of whatever it is you do.
- The secret is no irony.
You gotta commit to Thunder Road
if you wanna get the deal done.
So, obviously, I had to look up your resume
and you have a lot of experience with gastropods
which is a whole world of weird sexual activity
that we did not address on the show.
So what do they, what are part of their arsenals?
- Well, first of all, you have to realize
that snails, many land snails are hermaphrodites.
So their mates are female and male at the same time.
So whichever snail they meet, it's always a potential mate.
And then one of the things that snails,
many land snails do is they have these so-called love darts
and these are calcium spikes
that they stick into each other while they're mating
but if you're a good dart shooter,
and you shoot it in the right way
and you fill it with a lot of hormone
then you're a successful father.
- A topic that we covered on the show was bedbugs.
Honest to God, it's a battlefield,
the horrifying way that that happens.
Are there ways that females can adapt
and kind of develop their own set of weaponry?
Not to get all hashtag woke,
but it seems like a lot of male-driven violence
in the natural world.
- Yeah, but there's also, it really works both ways
so often you see that there's sort of an
evolutionary arms race going on
that every thing that on the male side evolves,
there's some sort of countermeasure on the female side.
So with bedbugs for example,
you see that the females often evolve
a completely new set of genitals
in the place where the male normally pierces its penis
so they sort of have these new, basically a new vagina
that receives this stiletto like penis
and again, can then control what happens to the sperm
that they inject.
- Just to help me clarify,
how does that give them the advantage?
- Well, because what the male of course
is trying to do is to bypass the female's ability
to decide what happens to his sperm.
Normally, when they, in many other insects,
the female receives the sperm
and then puts it in the special pocket
and then she can decide whether she wants to get rid of it
or use it to fertilize her eggs
and if so which eggs and how many.
- Besides bedbugs, and besides snails,
are there any other exceptional mechanisms
at work in the natural kingdom
that you can think of?
- Well there's also, it's not just a battlefield.
There's also a lot of very sweet copulation going on
in insects.
For example, in many beetles,
the males have these two little drumsticks
or little brushes on either side of their penis
and they use that to stroke or to drum on the abdomen,
on the backside of the female during mating
and that's really kind of a courtship during copulation
so the males that are able to drum
in the most pleasurable way are the ones
that have the highest chance of having their sperm
absorbed and received by the female.
- Oh that's good for beetles
but when I try the drum solo from the Hawaii Five-0 theme,
I'm the asshole.
- Yeah, well there's that too.
- So what got you fascinated by the,
I'll say the less cuddly aspects of the animal kingdom?
- Like I mentioned before, these organs
that have to do with sex,
they evolve faster so that means
that there's also bigger differences
between species that are very closely related
and you can actually use them to identify the species with
and then, when I figured that out,
I started to get interested in the question of
why are they so different
and how does that evolution work?
- And other changes take more?
- Yeah, for example, if you take any random family
of monkeys, I mean different species of monkeys,
you usually can see differences in the shape of the penis
but the kidneys, they all look kidney-shaped.
They're all the same.
- It gets the most immediate results
if the goal is procreation.
- Exactly, it's very close to,
it sits very close to actual reproduction.
So if anything you change in the genitals will affect
how many offspring you get.
- If I got the genetic lottery
and have a super kidney,
I'm like, you won't even believe the amount of liquid waste
I can process.
Meanwhile, if I have dick two point 0,
that's gonna immediately pay off.
- Yeah, there's no maybe, that's for sure.
- I swear to God, if high school biology
was this frank and this honest,
I would've done way better in high school.
Menno, how can we follow your work online?
Are there different projects you wanna tell us about?
Like please, plug away.
- Well, you can follow me on Twitter @schilthuizen
or you could order and read my book, Nature's Nether Regions
- Menno, thank you so much.
I appreciate your expertise
and it is amazing thanks to technology
that we got to have this conversation.
- My pleasure.
Thank you very much.
- Well, I don't think any of us need
to hear the word genitals again in our entire lives.
Thanks for checking us out on What the Facts
and tune in next time on dropout.tv.