What is made of penis material, is twelve feet long and is inside a whale's mouth?

Glad you asked. It's a thingie to cool down a whale's brain.

This is a story about the discovery of an organ that measures twelve feet long and four inches wide. You might well assume that this is old news. After all, how could something the size of a lamppost go unnoticed by anatomists? And yet, in fact, it’s only just come to light.

The discovery emerged out of a blood-drenched confusion. Alexander Werth, an anatomist, was standing on an ice sheet miles off the coast of Alaska’s North Slope. He was watching Inupiat whale hunters dismember bowhead whales they had caught in the Bering Sea. This government-sanctioned hunt is one of the best opportunities for whale anatomists to get hold of fresh tissue from the animals.

To take apart the head of a whale, the hunters would slice off the lower jaws and the tongue, which could be as big as a minivan. They would then climb onto the roof of the whale’s mouth and cut away the baleen–the hair-like growths that the whale used in life to filter small animals from the water. On the roof of the mouths of bowhead whales, Werth and his colleagues noticed something strange: a peculiar rod-like organ stretching down the midline of the palate.

It had never been described in the bowhead before. What made the organ particularly peculiar was that, as the Inupiat cut the whales apart, it poured forth huge amounts of blood. Why, the scientists wondered, should a bowhead whale have an organ in the roof of their mouth? And why should it be so bloody?

One of Werth’s colleagues, Thomas Ford of Ocean Alliance, had noticedsomething similar in right whales twenty years ago. So Werth, Ford, and Craig George the Department of Wildlife Management at the North Slope Borough in Alaska decided to take a close look at the bowhead whales. They dissected some of the organs out of freshly killed whales, photographing them as they cut the tissue free. They brought one of the organs back to their lab, along with sections they chopped out of other organs, to examine under a microscope.

And this is where the story gets a little NSWF.

You see, the organ in the whale’s mouth turned out to be, biomechanically speaking, a twelve-foot-long penis.

Penises–in humans, whales, and other mammals–are made of adistinctively sponge-like tissue. When blood pours into the penis, the tissue stores it in a multitude of cavities, stretching out to hold the increased volume. As the penis swells, collagen fibers wrapped around the spongy tissue stretch and then tighten. Thus the penis becomes both enlarged and hardened. Unlike a bone, which is always hard, the penis can become soft again when its vessels pump out all the blood.

The organ in the bowhead whale mouth, Werth and his colleagues found, has the same distinctively spongy tissue, along with copious vessels supplying it with blood. Its anatomy strongly suggests that the whales can engorge it–hence the bloody mess it made when the whales were cut apart. Werth and his colleagues traced the blood vessels out of the organ and into the interior of the whale head. They found that they made close contact with a web of blood vessels at the base of the brain.

Read it all. Fascinating stuff.

 

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