Jamie Hall, Canwest News Service
Published: Friday, February 08, 2008
EDMONTON - In a barnacle's world, it's not just size that matters, it's shape, too. And it turns out they have both.Two University of Alberta marine biologists have discovered that barnacles are the best-endowed of all species -with penises that can reach up to eight times their body length.
The invertebrate *******, which spend their entire lives attached to rocks, are able to change not only the size but the shape of their penises to better reach potential mates.This sexual feat is directly related to the ***** of wave motion within their habitat.Chris Neufeld and Richard Palmer, whose findings were published Thursday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a biological research journal, already knew from past projects that intertidal barnacles could rapidly change the length of their feeding legs to catch food in the water to deal with the wide range of water velocities they experienced.
The question then became: Does it apply to other appendages?
The answer was yes.The pair conducted their research at the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre on the west coast of Vancouver Island, where they sampled barnacles collected from Barclay Sound in a wide range of variations in wave *****.When wave action was light, the barnacles' penises became longer and thinner, in higher wave action they became shorter and stouter, in both cases to make them more manoeuvrable in the flow of water and thus able to reach more mates.Barnacles are hermaphrodites, so they can mate with males or females, Neufeld explained.
© Canwest News Service 2008
