Every stick is pointy when it’s travelling fast enough

Thanks for joining penis and intermittent organ facts.

Did you know that the “tail” of the male coastal tailed frog is actually an extension of the cloaca effectively acting as an intermittent organ?

Reply ‘more cock’ for more facts about penises and intermittent organs.

Hemipenes (and penis/intermittent organs) are really diverse in terms of size and shape. A lot of lizards and snakes have little nodules and barbs that vary from species to species. Not sure what the ornaments do, but it’s interesting. Also interesting is that having two (i.e. one on each side) potentially means that there’s a handedness in terms of the preferred side used for mating.

Other fun facts about penises and other intermittent organs: cats and other felids have barbed penises that force ovulation in the female. Tangentially related are the pseudo penises of female hyenas.

More fun facts: damselfly males have intermittent organs that are spoon shaped so they scrape out the sperm of rival males.

Respond ‘cock facts’ to learn more about penises and intermittent organs.

Respond ‘stop’ if you don’t want to learn cool shit.

I took an astronomy class when I was an undergrad. We had a scene-by-scene breakdown of all the stupid shit in this movie.

Adding to this: XX and XY works for mammals, but not for other vertebrates (fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians). Birds and reptiles have Z and W chromosomes, and unlike in mammals where females are homozygotes, males in these groups are homozygotes. Some reptiles have temperature dependent sex determination, where ambient temperature above some value will produce males or females (depends on species). Some reptiles are composed entirely of females.

Some fish will straight up change sexes depending on age and male-female ratio in a social group.

In other groups it’s not even different chromosomes but simply copy number of specific genes.

Plants can do all sorts of whacky things like produce seeds and pollen in the same individual.

Fungi are an entirely different cluster fuck because they have mating types which are not simple binaries.

Eukaryotic sex determination isn’t a binary and it isn’t even a nicely categorizable spectrum. It’s a grab-bag of whatever doesn’t perma-fuck your genome.

Source: me, I’m a biologist. Though admittedly I work on animals so my understanding of fungi and plant stuff is fuzzy at best.