this post was submitted on 29 May 2024
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[–] [email protected] 86 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Well that led to a fun Google search and surprising results. Today I learned.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Congratulations! You're now on a list!

[–] [email protected] 34 points 5 months ago (1 children)

There's a list for alligator-fuckers?

[–] [email protected] 31 points 5 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

It's considered a prestigious list down there

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

There’s a list for everything in Florida.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

You can throw that list I'm now on on top of the pile of other lists I'm on.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

Soon Google will mistakenly identify them as the next governor of Florida

[–] [email protected] 78 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I knew this would come in handy some day

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

If anyone is wondering, look up "cloaca".

[–] [email protected] 48 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Just drape your coat over your arm in front of you like an elegant gentleman. No one will ever suspect.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago (1 children)

"Uhhhhhhhhh, Gary? It's 93 degrees and humid here in Florida.....why do you keep carrying around that fur coat?"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Now I'm imagining an alligator wearing a rain coat, not zipped up, and standing.........JAZZ HANDS!!!! And an erection.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

"I've got my little yellow jacket on, and I'm ready to mingle." He starts hopping both hind feet forward simultaneously and thrusting his erection forward in tandem.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I'd say not correct because they just have a realy odd mechanisms to get it out instead of expanding like most other animals.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

This is The Far Side version of a Seinfeld episode.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 5 months ago (3 children)

For anybody who needs some help,

Flex your glutes and thighs a bunch, it'll promote blood flow away from the NARB and be relatively discreet too.

Crossing your legs and flexing the calves also help

[–] [email protected] 29 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

...NARB? I feel like it should be pretty obvious that whatever that is, it's not a well-known enough acronym to use without definition. I can guess the B is boner but I haven't a single clue what NAR is.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, I'd definitely recommend working in a quick step of thinking "is it reasonable to expect the people who read this to know what this acronym means?"

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I HHNIWYTA, it's IETFOWTM, obviously.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I honestly have no idea what you're talking about.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It's incredibly easy to figure out what that means.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Haha, awesome, you were both correct.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

But then we would have entirely missed this amusing exchange.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

Try bottom surgery for a more permanent solution

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

If a RHT^1 is causing if I find that not only the FYGAT^2 doesn't always suffice, but the intuitive technique of TOSE^3 tends to be counterproductive. What I do to stop RHTs is instead broadening my field of vision to look at everything at once and simultaneously trying to listen to every sound I can hear at once. Any given thought or information can be somehow integrated into a RHT and feed it, but many informations at once can't.

!^1 : Random Horny Thought!<

!^2 : Flex Your Glutes And Thighs!<

!^3 : Think Of Something Else!<

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago

Wearing sweatpants to go shopping, that’s how you know he’s American

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Soft Paywall

Hard alligator, actually.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Odd, it wasn't for me.

National Geographic Logo - HomeSKIP TO CONTENT LOGIN SUBSCRIBE

SCIENCE NOT EXACTLY ROCKET SCIENCE The Alligator Has a Permanently Erect, Bungee Penis ByEd Yong February 12, 2013 • 7 min read In the video above, Brandon Moore from Louisiana Tech University is dissecting a freshly dead male alligator. You’re looking at the creature’s underside, near its hip area. As the sequence begins, Moore’s scalpel touches the alligator’s pelvic nerve. The metal makes the nerve fire and… well… just watch the video.

That’s the alligator’s penis—ten centimetres long, ghostly white, and surprisingly quick-moving. It flips out in an instant and just hangs there for a few seconds to greet a startled Moore, before twanging back inside just as quickly. I love that Moore back-steps and freezes. There’s no audio. I wish there was audio.

The video was a revelation to Diane Kelly from the University of Massachusetts, and the key to interpreting the utterly bizarre penis of the American alligator. Here are the highlights: it’s permanently erect; it shoots out like toothpaste from a tube; and it bounces back because it basically has a rubber band attached to it. “It is really weird,” says Kelly. “Really weird.”

an American alligator

American alligator PHOTOGRAPHY BY SARAH TOWNE That’s not something she’d say lightly. Animal penises are her speciality. She has studied and dissected the male organs of mammals and turtles to better understand their anatomy and their evolutionary history. Meanwhile, her close colleague Patricia Brennan—“the other penis lady”—had done a lot of work on birds, snakes and lizards (remember the infamous duck penis video?). The crocodilians—crocodiles, alligators and their kin—seemed like the obvious group to target next.

Here’s what we knew about their penises before Kelly started. The males have a single large phallus stashed within the cloaca. That’s the joint opening you can see in the video above, which also gives way to the urinary and digestive tracts. Sperm travels along a deep groove running the length of the penis, which is surrounded by dense tissue. Okay, but how does a crocodilian inflate its penis or eject it from the cloaca?

To find out, Kelly needed to get her hands on some crocodilians. Fortunately, she didn’t have to work with living ones. In September, she headed down to the Rockerfeller Wildlife Refuge in Louisiana, which has an annual cull to control the local population of American alligators. They let her work with four of the animals that had been shot, including a huge four-metre-long bull. “It was really scary, even though it was dead!” says Kelly.

Through dissection, she discovered that the alligator’s penis doesn’t inflate at all. It’s permanently erect. The whole structure is filled with dense layers of a stiff protein called collagen. Even the central bit, where blood would normally flow down, is just collagen, collagen and more collagen.

That’s bizarre. Whenever a reptile, bird or mammal has a penis (and some don’t), it always inflates in some way. Maybe blood pumps into it, as in humans, other mammals, and turtles. Maybe it explosively turns inside-out like in ducks and some lizards or snakes. Either way, some shape-changing occurs. But not in alligators—when Kelly tried to artificially inflate the penis by pumping saline, it didn’t change in either length or diameter.

So, if the penis doesn’t inflate, how does the male alligator extrude it from the cloaca? Muscles would be the obvious answer, but continuing the theme of “really weird”, the penis has no muscles attached to it. It’s almost free-floating. One pair of muscles—the levator cloacae—cradle the penis like a sling, but doesn’t actually connect.

This stumped Kelly until she saw Moore’s video. She now thinks that when the levator cloacae contract, they force the penis out by squeezing the cloacal chamber. “This squishes the whole penis and pops it out of the vent,” she says. Indeed, when Kelly yanked on the levator cloacae by hand, the penis of her dead alligator leapt into the outside world.

I said the penis is almost free-floating. It’s got a tendon that connects to its middle, which helps to swivel it forwards when it pops out. Its base is also attached to the hip bone by a pair of large ligaments, that are “the consistency of the big rubber bands the post office uses,” says Kelly. When the penis comes out, these rubber bands are stretched. As soon as the levator cloacae relax, the elastic ligaments yank the penis back in.

an alligator penis

Alligator penis. PHOTOGRAPH BY DIANE KELLY This is just a hypothesis. Kelly now wants to do some tests of the muscles, tendons and ligaments to check that the “ones I think are everting the penis are actually the ones that are doing this”. Then, it’s time to look at living crocodilians to see how they actually use their penises, and how they might benefit from a permanently erect organ.

I leave you with this—an autographed cocktail napkin on which Kelly sketched out the alligators’ genital tract for me at a bar in Raleigh, North Carolina. She would like me to note that is it not to scale.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Maybe it’s just me, but as a kid learning biology in highschool, I thought we knew everything about the world, and now here’s a lady in 2024, figuring out how alligator penises work. Of course it’s a small and niche topic, but still surprising to me how some doctor with a beard didn’t already do a 100 cruel experiments on this topic in the 50s.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Just subscribe a made up email address. I just mashed my keyboard a few times to type in an address and it worked.

Also trying to force someone to sign up to their mailing list just so you can see an article is a shit tactic. Who the fuck signs up to mailing lists from random websites anyway?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago (3 children)

You've been automatically signed up for Lemmy facts.

Lemmy fact #538 - Did you know when I first signed up, I'd occasionally type Lenny instead of Lemmy. Lenny is a character from the Simpsons whom I thought this platform was named after.

Would you like another Lemmy fact?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

Lemmy fact # 22 - Lemmy spelled backwards is Ymmel. Which isn't a word, but will get you weird looks from people around you if you try to pronounce it outloud in a library.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

"My eye! I'm not supposed to get pudding in it!"

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Lemmy fact #721 - Did you know Lemmy has over 3 users on the platform? It's true.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

There are dozens of us!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Disabling JavaScript with uBlock works like a charm.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

Says video is private for me.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I apparently had a lot in common with alligators, when I was a kid.

I would also stay just under the surface of the water, to hide my erection.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

Serves him right for putting his jeans in the dryer!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Why would anyone buy sweatpants for themselves if they have a permanent erection?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

Sometimes you need the right outfit when you want to make a power move.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Twelve year old JoMiran's spirit animal.

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