Bat uses penis as ‘arm’ and mates without penetration – 11/22/2023 – Science

The mystery of one of the largest sexual organs in the animal kingdom appears to have been solved thanks to a Dutch retiree, who filmed bats during a sexual act in a church attic.

The dark peppermint bat, known as the serotine bat, does not use its huge and unusual penis for penetration, but rather as a “copulating arm” for mating, a team of European researchers said last Monday (20).

This is the first time we have heard of a mammal that reproduces without sexual penetration, the researchers added.

NicolasFasel, a researcher at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, told AFP that his team has been observing serotine bats for years and discovered that their “penis is super long when erect.”

The male’s sexual organ is approximately seven times larger than the vaginas of females of the same species, according to scientists’ measurements.

To complete the eccentric scenario, the head of the penis expands into a heart shape, which has left scientists perplexed.

“There is no way to penetrate this structure,” saidFasel, who led a study published in the journal Current Biology.

‘Really surprised’

Relatively little was known about how bats mate, due to the difficulty of observing the exact moment. And scientists had not found a way to solve this mystery. Until one day Façal received a strange email.

“Penis” was the first word in the email’s subject line, followed by a Dutch term and the word Eptesicusfrom the scientific name Eptesicus serotinus. So the scientist risked opening the message and seeing the videos sent of this common species in the forests of Europe and Asia.

“I was really surprised because we had our response,” he said.

The email was from Jan Jeucken, a retiree with no scientific training who lives in the village of Castenray in the south of the Netherlands.

Jeucken was interested in a population of serotine bats that lived in the attic of a local church, where he installed cameras.

Casol said Jeucken’s “passion made him the best observer to understand bats,” so the retiree was named co-author of the study.

The researchers analyzed 93 matings in the church attic, as well as four recordings at a bat rehabilitation center in Ukraine.

During the act, males grab females by the back of the neck and use their penises as an extra arm to wrap around and remove a large membrane used to protect the vagina, experts said.

The long, silent embrace called “contact mating” is the moment when semen is transferred, without scientists being sure how it is produced. What they can confirm is that the female’s abdomen contains remnants of these fluids.

Although this form of reproduction, also called “cloacal kissing”, is common in birds, it has never been observed in a mammal.

The mating process takes time. The average duration was 53 minutes, but the longest was almost 13 hours.

Casol speculated that females could use their exceptionally long cervix to hold sperm from several males for months before choosing which one to breed with.

It’s possible that other bat species mate without penetration, the researcher said, adding that more research is needed.

“We could see that there are many species with very strange penises,” he added.