Name: 【TED】Carin Bondar: The birds and the bees are just the beginning (The birds and the bees are just the beginning | Carin Bondar)
Uploaded: 2015-01-06T04:40:53.000Z
Duration: 9 min 48 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Anyone in the room thought about sex today?

Thank you for putting your hand up over there.

that you might not have known about wild sex.

such specific categories didn't even exist.

It wasn't until about 500 million years ago

that we start to see structures akin to a penis

and a vagina, something that receives it.

Now invariably, you're probably thinking about

but the diversity that we see in sexual structures

It's a close relative of squid and octopus,

finds the female through
pheromonal cues in the water,

For many decades, biologists actually felt

that the hectocotylus was a
separate organism altogether.

Now, the tapir is a mammal from South America.

It actually has a level of dexterity in its penis

much akin to what we have with our hands.

and deposit sperm directly into the female's uterus,

if it were the same size as that of a barnacle.

So with all of this diversity in structure,

are fitting neatly into vaginas all over the place

for the purposes of successful reproduction.

But of course, that doesn't exactly happen,

and that's because we can't
just take form into account.

function relates to the contributions made

by the gametes, or the sperm and the eggs.

And these contributions are far from equal.

so it makes sense for females to be very choosy

Sperm, on the other hand, is abundant and cheap,

with these very incongruent
needs between the sexes?

I mean, if a female doesn't choose a particular male,

then it makes more sense for her to spend her time

doing other biologically relevant things:

avoiding predators, taking care of offspring,

This is, of course, bad news for any male

who has yet to make a deposit in her sperm bank,

and this sets the scene for
some pretty drastic strategies

and it's aptly termed traumatic insemination.

that they literally stab into the female,

and they don't stab it anywhere near her vagina.

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【TED】Carin Bondar: The birds and the bees are just the beginning (The birds and the bees are just the beginning | Carin Bondar)

strategy

offspring

diversity

body