shewolfnm wrote:So then, why do squirrels have such big f'n balls?
Those things are SO BIG I dont see how they can balance themselves.
haha
Squirells do have a tendency to lose their nuts. Maybe that's how it balances out. Some interesting facts:
Largest Penis
As any rational person would have expected, the largest organisms ever to exist on earth would also have the largest endowments. Among land animals, African bull elephants lead the pack with their 5 to 6 ft. extremities. Whale penises, called dorks (yes, when called a dork in grade school you were actually being compared to a whale schlong), are the largest in the world, the blue whale being the champ with phalli approximately 10 ft. long and 1 ft. in diameter. Its smaller cousins, notably the appropriately named humpback and sperm whale, have penises that measure 9 feet or so. Makes you wonder if this is what Melville had in mind when he chose the title Moby Dick (snicker).
If you measure as a percentage of body length things are a little different. Goose barnacles, with inch-and-a-half-long appendages, rate about 150%. Unbeatable, you think, until you learn that a rare species of Alpine banana slugs (Ariolimax dolichophallus) measure 6-inches long and possess 32.5-inch tumescences, or 542% times their body length. Incredible.
Largest Testes
The largest for land animals belong to, unsurprisingly, the African bull elephant, with testes that weigh around 4.4 lbs. each and encompass a volume of 184 cubic inches?-about the size of a large football.
But the REAL hands-down winner is the northern right whale (Eubalaena glacialis), which has a pair of gonads that can weigh up to 2,200 lbs. The enormous size is an evolutionary adaptation caused by a natural phenomenon known as "sperm competition." When the females of the species come into heat, she's immediately mobbed by 30 or so love-starved males who shove one another as they try to jockey into position. When one male finishes (typically this takes 30 seconds), another takes up the slack. And another. The hope of each is to wash out a competitor's sperm with unknown gallons of their own, thereby ensuring that their genes will continue.
Longest Sperm
In most animals, sperm production is much like budget reform proposals: created in great quantities with minimum effort put behind each. But not all creatures follow suit. Drosophila bifurca, a distant relative of the fruit fly, produce sperm 6 cm in length?-20 times longer than their entire body length.
Largest Vagina
Belongs to (what else?) the female blue whale, who naturally must park the 10-foot organ of the males. The vulva is basically a long groove along the underside of the female, with a normal length of 6 to 8 feet before elongating to accommodate the male. After coition it expands to some 23 feet in length to hold the baby calf.
Judged as a percentage of body mass, the undisputed winner is the bumblebee threadworm (Sphaerularia bombi). After being impregnated, the female seeks out a queen bee as a host (hence its name). After settling in her uterus and vagina begin to expand, growing until they encompass the entire genital tract, and eventually her entire being?-and keeps right on going. I quote from The Natural History of Nematodes (G. Poinar, 1983): "
in Sphaerularia bombi the entire uterus is [expelled] and the expanding organ soon surpasses the length of the nematode. When the uterine cells eventually finish their growth, the reproductive system dwarfs the now moribund female
" The reproductive organs may grow up to 30 times the length of the original female and 300 times the volume, for an overall increase of a whopping 30,000%.
<Now this one will really make you laugh>:
Most Copulations
Whether you think of them as cuddly pets or plague carriers, rodents reign supreme when it comes to repeated mating. I quote from "Copulatory Behavior of Small Mammals" (Journal of Comparative Psychology, v. 39): "In the
golden hamster Mesocricetus auratus...copulations may continue for half an hour or more; young males may copulate only a few times, while older ones may attempt copulation as many as 175 times; for adult males, between 65 and 75 copulations per mating may be considered as average." That alone isn't all that impressive: A type of gerbil called Shaw's jird (Meriones shawi shawi) has been observed to copulate 224 times in the space of 2 hours.
