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The
The Icelandic Phallological Museum has a portion of a blue whale's penis measuring long and weighing , which ''Iceland Review'' has dubbed "a real Moby Dick". The specimen is just the tip, as the entire organ, when intact, would have been about long and weighed about , well above average for even a blue whale. By comparison, an adult elephant's penis is the largest penis of any land animal at on average.
''Wild Blue: A Natural History of the World's Largest Animal''
Macmillan. p. 9. *
Photograph of the carcass of a 60 ft sperm whale in Taiwan, penis still intact
Art of Angling by Richard Brookes, 1781, page 294: Penis of the Whale
{{Authority control Mammal penis Cetacean anatomy Blue whales
The blue whale
The blue whale (''Balaenoptera musculus'') is a marine mammal and a baleen whale. Reaching a maximum confirmed length of and weighing up to , it is the largest animal known to have ever existed. The blue whale's long and slender body can ...
penis is the largest in the animal kingdom. It is commonly cited as having an average penis length of to and a diameter of to .
Morphology
The reported average penis length varies but is usually mentioned to have an average length of . The most common reported average length is roughly but the average diameter is only , making the penis proportionately very long and thin. However, its girth has also been reported to be nearer , with a single ejaculation estimated to be about , based on the size of itstestes
A testicle or testis (plural testes) is the male reproductive gland or gonad in all bilaterians, including humans. It is homologous to the female ovary. The functions of the testes are to produce both sperm and androgens, primarily testoste ...
each weighing .
"Average" for a blue whale penis
A penis (plural ''penises'' or ''penes'' () is the primary sexual organ that male animals use to inseminate females (or hermaphrodites) during copulation. Such organs occur in many animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate, but males d ...
, however, is difficult to gauge given that the penis is unlikely to be able to be measured during sexual intercourse. The penis of the blue whale is normally hidden inside its body and jets out through a genital slit during intercourse. They are stated to be tough and fibrous (more than in any other mammal
Mammals () are a group of vertebrate animals constituting the class Mammalia (), characterized by the presence of mammary glands which in females produce milk for feeding (nursing) their young, a neocortex (a region of the brain), fur ...
). It is believed that it uses the elasticity of this tissue to get an erection and not from any blood flow, though this hypothesis
A hypothesis (plural hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. For a hypothesis to be a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it. Scientists generally base scientific hypotheses on previous obse ...
has not been confirmed by any scientific study.
Scientific studies
With whales, the length of the penis can be an indication of the maturity of the organism.Sei whale
The sei whale ( , ; ''Balaenoptera borealis'') is a baleen whale, the third-largest rorqual after the blue whale and the fin whale. It inhabits most oceans and adjoining seas, and prefers deep offshore waters. It avoids polar and tropical w ...
s for instance are divided into categories such as immature, pubertal and mature. However, length is not the only factor as it is recorded in relation to the size of the whale's testes and its histology
Histology,
also known as microscopic anatomy or microanatomy, is the branch of biology which studies the microscopic anatomy of biological tissues. Histology is the microscopic counterpart to gross anatomy, which looks at larger structures v ...
. For instance, research conducted off South Africa found that the longest penis of an immature categorized whale was and the smallest penis of a mature whale was . By comparison the average blue whale penis is nearly 3 times the size of that of a sei whale. Specimen measurements indicate that a blue whale measuring in length had a vestigial
Vestigiality is the retention, during the process of evolution, of genetically determined structures or attributes that have lost some or all of the ancestral function in a given species. Assessment of the vestigiality must generally rely on co ...
mammary slit of width and length, with a penis measurement of . In another specimen in which the length of the whale was and weighed 50.9 metric tons
The tonne ( or ; symbol: t) is a unit of mass equal to 1000 kilograms. It is a non-SI unit accepted for use with SI. It is also referred to as a metric ton to distinguish it from the non-metric units of the short ton ( United State ...
, the brain weighed only .
Largest specimen
The Icelandic Phallological Museum has a portion of a blue whale's penis measuring long and weighing , which ''Iceland Review'' has dubbed "a real Moby Dick". The specimen is just the tip, as the entire organ, when intact, would have been about long and weighed about , well above average for even a blue whale. By comparison, an adult elephant's penis is the largest penis of any land animal at on average.
See also
* Cetacean penises *Largest body part
The largest body part is either the largest given body part across all living and extinct organisms or the largest example of a body part within an existing species. The largest animals on the planet are not the only ones to have large body parts ...
*
References
Further reading
* Bortolotti, Dan (2008)''Wild Blue: A Natural History of the World's Largest Animal''
Macmillan. p. 9. *
External links
Photograph of the carcass of a 60 ft sperm whale in Taiwan, penis still intact
Art of Angling by Richard Brookes, 1781, page 294: Penis of the Whale
{{Authority control Mammal penis Cetacean anatomy Blue whales