According To New Research, Dolphin Females Have Working Clitoris 'Surprisingly Similar' To Humans

Dolphins are known to be the only species besides human beings that have sex for pleasure and not just procreation. Now, according to a study in the journal Current Biology, female dolphins have a functional clitoris like humans.

According to the discovery, the clitoris-like structure is positioned in the vaginal entrance of bottlenose dolphins; it has lots of sensory nerves and erectile bodies.

¡°The dolphin clitoris has many features to suggest that it functions to provide pleasure to females,¡± says first author Patricia Brennan, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.

Newsweek

Dolphins have sex throughout the year as a way of forging and maintaining social bonds since they are highly social beings. It also says that dolphin females have a clitoris in the vagina in a spot that would make stimulation during copulation a possibility. There have also been reports of females rubbing each other¡¯s clitorises with their snouts, flippers, and flukes.

During the new study, the researchers looked closely at clitorises from 11 females that had died naturally. Their presence, shape, and configuration of erectile bodies were examined along with how nerve fibres ran through the tissues. Their findings support the notion of a working clitoris in dolphins.

¡°Just like the human clitoris, the dolphin clitoris has large areas of erectile tissue that fill up with blood,¡± Brennan says.

¡°Since the entire pelvis of dolphins is so different to humans, it was surprising to see how similar the shapes were,¡± she says. ¡°Also, the size of the nerves in the clitoris body was very surprising. Some were larger than half a millimeter in diameter.¡±

Patricia Brennan

The erectile tissue shape changes as animals become adults, she added, suggesting that it acquires a functional role. The studies further show that the clitoris body has large nerves and many free nerve endings right underneath the skin, which is much thinner there than in the adjacent skin. They also found genital corpuscles much like those previously described in the human clitoris and penis tip, which are known to be involved in the pleasure response.

Brennan added that they got curious about the dolphin clitoris while studying the evolution of vaginas in dolphins.

¡°Every time we dissected a vagina, we would see this very large clitoris, and we were curious whether anyone had examined it in detail to see if it worked like a human clitoris,¡± she says.

¡°We knew that dolphins have sex not just to reproduce, but also to solidify social bonds, so it seemed likely that the clitoris could be functional.¡± Even the human clitoris wasn't fully described until the 1990s.

¡°This neglect in the study of female sexuality has left us with an incomplete picture of the true nature of sexual behaviors. Studying and understanding sexual behaviors in nature is a fundamental part of understanding the animal experience and may even have important medical applications in the future," Brennan says.

Dara Orbach

Now, her team will continue to examine the clitoris and genitalia of dolphins to know more.

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