![]() So inflating the marine mammal members required creativity. “We’re not talking hand-sized - we’re talking arm-sized, depending on the species,” Orbach added (“We did a killer whale, which was bigger than the table”). The cetacean dongs were “another matter altogether.” “Most of what I have done are really small - armadillos, rats and mice, voles and other small things - where you just have to have a little syringe and a teeny bit of pressure and you get your erect morphology very quickly,” Kelly explained. Then they brought on Kelly for her penile inflation expertise. Orbach turned to Brennan, a genital expert at Mount Holyoke College known for her work on ducks (and their terrifying penises ), and together, with a caulking gun and silicone, they created models called ‘endocasts’ of vaginas from Orbach’s collection of 140 frozen marine mammal genitalia (all collected from animals that died of natural causes). ![]() That meant to understand the animals’ vaginas, she needed their corresponding penises to see how they fit together during intercourse. “But as I started dissecting more and more reproductive tracts and looking at this amazing level of vaginal variability which had never been documented before, I realized this probably somehow coevolved with the penis,” said Orbach. She already knew that marine mammal vaginas are far more complex than anyone has given them credit for - lots of labyrinthine pockets, folds, and twists, which Orbach suspects may help females control paternity. Orbach, a postdoctoral fellow at Dalhousie University and research associate at Mount Holyoke College, had the vaginas ready. The goal: make the first 3-D CT scans of simulated intercourse of any marine mammal species using real, post-mortem genitalia - scans that were just published in a paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Finding a way around this hard problem is a large part of why Dara Orbach and Patricia Brennan brought Kelly on to the project.
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