According to the first comprehensive study on the topic published on Wednesday, female snakes have clitorises. The researchers criticized how little is known about female sex organs in comparison to males across species.
Previous studies had made the assumption that the female snakes’ organs were fragrance glands, immature penises, or even there to stimulate males rather than the other way around.
The latest research, which provides the first comprehensive description of snake clitorises, asserted that it has “definitively” ruled out such notions.
The results imply that clitorises may be widespread in squamates, the biggest order of reptiles that includes snakes, and may be crucial for their reproductive processes.
However, comparably little research has been done on the topic, much like how little is known about the clitorises of almost all species, including humans.
Male squamates are known to possess a hemipenis, also known as a dual sex organ, since the 1800s. The female sexual organ, or hemiclitores, was initially characterized by German herpetologist Wolfgang Boehme in 1995 while he was studying monitor lizards.
“Female genitalia are conspicuously overlooked in comparison to their male counterparts, limiting our understanding of sexual reproduction across vertebrate lineages,” wrote the authors of the study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The principal author of the new study, Megan Folwell, a PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide in Australia, told AFP that she began by examining the hemiclitores of a common death adder.
The team of Australian and American researchers went on to dissect 10 snakes from nine different species, including the carpet python, puff adder and Mexican moccasin.
They found that snakes have two individual clitorises — hemiclitores — separated by tissue and hidden by skin on the underside of the tail.
For the death adder, the organ forms a triangle shape “like a heart”, Folwell said.
Some are quite thin while others take up almost all the area around the cloaca, the tiny opening for the digestive, urinary and reproductive tract. Sizes ranged from less than a millimetre to seven millimetres.
The organs have erectile tissue that likely swells with blood as well as nerve bundles which “may be indicative of tactile sensitivity, similar to the mammalian clitoris,” the study said.
– ‘Taboo subject’ –
“Snakes are very tactile animals,” Folwell said, “so there’s quite a high chance that they would get quite a lot of sensation even through the skin.”
If the snakes’ hemiclitores are stimulated during sex, it likely prompts longer and more frequent mating, resulting in a greater chance of reproductive success.
“Pleasure is such an important part of reproduction,” Folwell said.
It could lead to lubrication to prevent damage from the “very spiny hemipenis” of male snakes, she said, adding that “we don’t know”.
So why did it take so long for scientists to get here?
“It’s quite a taboo subject, female genitalia is not the easiest topic to bring up and be respected,” Folwell said.
“There’s also the fact that it is not the easiest structure to find,” she said. “Especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for or where.”
The study comes after a research abstract presented in the United States earlier this year said that the human clitoris has between 9,850-1,100 nerve fibres — around 20 percent more than the previously widely cited number of 8,000, which reportedly came from research carried out on cows.
SOURCE: AFP
