Is There Really ‘Nothing Unnatural in Nature’?

This book should have been called “The Penis Book.” Sure, there are a few clitorises here and there, a few vaginas, but all in all, it’s about penises. Giant penises and tiny penises, singing penises and grabbing penises. Penises and more penises and still more penises galore. It’s an entertaining book. And a beautiful one. When it comes to the male member, exacting pencil illustrations by Julie Terrazzoni (alongside lush color illustrations of the implicated animals) help readers understand through their senses just how ingenious a designer Nature is. Take for example, the four-headed penis of the echidna. A cousin of the platypus, this ancient creature combines reptilian and mammalian features, like all monotremes, and is both oviparous and lactates. When erect, two of the male’s glans draw back, allowing the remaining two engorged ones to fit perfectly into the female. As with the twisting doubleheaded penis of the Common European Adder whose females writhe during sex, the locking mechanism explains why the ensuing mating is so prolonged—30 to 180 minutes. By comparison, we humans perform the deed on average only six minutes. Or what about the two-meter-long prehensile elephant penis? Sometimes referred to as a second trunk, males can use it to scratch their bellies and pick fruit from trees. By comparison the 16.5-inch-long Argentine lake duck penis may seem diminutive, but not if you consider that the duck’s entire body is 12 inches long. That’s peanuts compared to Darwin’s favorite animal, the barnacle, whose penis is fully eight times longer than itself. Attached as it is to a rock or back of a whale or hull of a ship, immobile, that kind of length can come in handy. Trunk shaped (the elephant and tapir), corkscrew shaped (the Muscovy duck), gutter shaped (the crocodile), or otherwise shaped like a jaw (in the fish Phallostethus cuulong, as detailed in the chapter “A Literal Dickhead”), penises in nature are a veritable smorgasbord. But penises don’t just come in different shapes and sizes; they also sport different strategies. The Great Argonaut, Argonauta argo, closely related to squid and octopus, has eight tentacles, but the third on the left is actually a penis. His entire body just 1–2 centimeters long as compared to the female’s 40–50 centimeter stature, the male uses its penis wisely by detaching it once it has crawled into the female’s hatch, an ingenious