Happy Nice Mall

Like cultured oysters, each dismembered dolphin vagina opened to reveal one kind of treasure: a flawless clitoris, the size of an AA battery, and the color of spam. Dr. “You open it and there’s a giant clitoris right there,” Brennan said.

The researchers dissected the clitoris of 11 commonly used bottlenose dolphins and passed the tissue samples through a micro-CT scanner. Their examination revealed a number of functional clitoris signs, including erectile tissue that can swell with blood. They also found a band of connective tissue surrounding the hardening tissue, allowing the clitoris to occlude and retain its shape. And as dolphins reached adulthood, the clitoris changed shape, suggesting it may have a function related to sexual maturity.

The CT scanner showed that the clitoral tissue contained unusually large nerves (up to half a millimeter in diameter) and an abundance of free nerve endings just under the skin, increasing sensitivity. And the clitoral skin itself was one-third the thickness of the adjacent genital skin, making it much easier to stimulate.

Brian Langerhans, an evolutionary biologist at North Carolina State University, said these observations provide “some nice, thought-provoking evidence” that female dolphins feel pleasure responses to tactile stimuli. He added that more research is needed to prove the hypothesis.

But experimentally examining dolphin sex in a lab or in the wild is no easy feat. The physiological signs of pleasure associated with humans and other primates – making noises, grimacing, rolling eyes and panting – can look completely different in a dolphin. Dr. “Their bodies are very different from ours and their faces are very different from ours,” Brennan said. “How will we know?”

Dr. Langerhans and Dr. Mesnick suggested that comparative studies are needed among other marine mammal species. “Will they find the same kind of anatomy in more solitary, open-ocean or deep-diving species?” Dr. Mesnick wondered. For example, a pleasurable clitoris may be much less beneficial in a species where males and females interact less.

Dr. Brennan hopes to study clitoris in the animal kingdom—her lab already has an orca clitoris sitting in a jar. The beluga whale of the marine clitoris may be that of the blue whale. Dr. “They have the biggest of everything,” Brennan said. “I’ll bet you a million dollars that she has clitoris, and it’s probably huge.”