Indeed, bowheads, like other marine mammals, have a very good adaptation for that job: namely, blubber. You’d think that bowheads would need special adaptations to keep their warmth in, not to get rid of it. And bowhead whales lead extraordinarily frigid lives, spending much of the year in the Arctic Ocean. Water is very good at pulling heat out of a body, even at lukewarm temperatures. Staying cool may seem like the last thing a bowhead whale needs to worry about. It has two jobs, the first of which is to keep the whale’s brain cool. They found that they made close contact with a web of blood vessels at the base of the brain.īased on these findings and others, Werth and his colleagues think they know what the organ–which they dubbed the Corpus Cavernosum Maxillaris–is for. Werth and his colleagues traced the blood vessels out of the organ and into the interior of the whale head. Its anatomy strongly suggests that the whales can engorge it–hence the bloody mess it made when the whales were cut apart. 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. Unlike a bone, which is always hard, the penis can become soft again when its vessels pump out all the blood. Thus the penis becomes both enlarged and hardened. As the penis swells, collagen fibers wrapped around the spongy tissue stretch and then tighten. When blood pours into the penis, the tissue stores it in a multitude of cavities, stretching out to hold the increased volume. Penises–in humans, whales, and other mammals–are made of a distinctively sponge-like tissue. You see, the organ in the whale’s mouth turned out to be, biomechanically speaking, a twelve-foot-long penis. They brought one of the organs back to their lab, along with sections they chopped out of other organs, to examine under a microscope.Īnd this is where the story gets a little NSWF. They dissected some of the organs out of freshly killed whales, photographing them as they cut the tissue free. 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. One of Werth’s colleagues, Thomas Ford of Ocean Alliance, had noticed something similar in right whales twenty years ago. Alligators have erections that never dissipate slugs have penises that emerge from their heads bees, meanwhile, endure having their penis ripped off following copulation.Please be respectful of copyright. If character is more intriguing than size, a number of other species fit the bill. These crustaceans can extend their penis up to eight times their body length. For real proportional penile prowess, the barnacle is king. Of course, these animals are massive to begin with. If that Guinness World Record-sized organ leads to feelings of inadequacy, there is a caveat: The blue whale’s appendage has an average diameter of 12 inches.įor land animals, the elephant comes in first place, with a penis roughly 6 feet in length. In fact, some have speculated a surfaced whale penis has been mistaken for sea monsters at times.

According to Roaring Earth, the average size of the whale’s penis is 8 to 10 feet long, making it the John Holmes of the sea. Already the largest animal in the world at a massive 330,000 pounds, 105 feet long (nearly as long as a basketball court), and with a heart the size of a golf cart, the blue whale is-let’s say proportional everywhere. That honor goes to the blue whale, which seems fitting.

What animal is the king of the jungle? Which runs the fastest? And-inevitably-which has the biggest penis? If you’re a fan of nature documentaries, you’re probably prone to wondering about absolutes.

Whale penis