Cetacean couplings in the sea

Flickr photo by davosweeney.

Dear Reader,

No doubt you are aware of the plight of poor Colin, the orphaned baby humpback whale who is currently (at time of posting) suckling boats in marinas along Sydney’s northern beaches, pathetically mistaking them for his mumma.

Ethicists are locked into smoky rooms as i type, trying to decide which is the right way to respond to Colin.

1. Should there be an attempted netting rescue, which may end with him being tragically and ironically drownded?
2. Should someone strap a huge susbtitute whale boob to the underside of the ship, and we humans raise little Colin to the point where the Japanese can harvest him for their scientific sushi research?
3. Should we let Gaia have her way with him?
4. Should we try to lure Colin out to the Big Ocean, where other whales can snub him and leave him to die?
5. Should someone from National Parks just go out and shoot him in the head with a shotgun (or possibly “a large dose of anaesthetics”), and put him out of his misery?

All quite difficult choices.

Not being an ethicist, i’m out of my league on this decision-making process, so i’m going to focus this post on option 2, since it involves boobies, which is an area of fascination for me.

Sorry. It’s an ethnic thing.

For a start, it turns out that whale boobs are not so much the familiar mammalian external bags (for want of a better description) that we are used to seeing on pretty much all land-dwelling mammals.

The whale-girl boobie is internal, and the milk exudes from a mammary slit.

Mmmmm… mammary slit…

The whale milk is not like your mother’s milk, dear Reader, all thin and sugary sweet. Oh, no. Whale milk comes out like mayonnaise, thick and gelatinous.

This is because, with only a slit to work with, the baby whale has no chance of latching on, the way you and i did to our mother’s teat.

Instead, the whale uses its tongue to form a water-tight seal over the slit, and then it sucks the mayonnaisey milk down its throat.

If you can roll your tongue, then you could have been a successful baby whale, dear Reader. It’s the same gene, apparently.

This revelation made me wonder about other transfers of thick, gelatinous liquids between whales. I wondered if the male whale, specifically, had some sort of phallic pit (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) that the fewhale has to form a water-tight seal around with her vagina.

[Note: some of the following links are to images of whale genitalia]

It turns out, though, that boy cetaceans have not pits, but large penises that they whip out at the least provocation, mainly since the penis is the only display option they have to win the heart of a shewhale with.

So enthusiastic are they to show off their highly individual wangs that human swimmers enjoying a little podplay with our cetacean pals are frequently being rubbed up by dolphin manhoods.

I checked online, and whale vaginas are pretty much identical to human ones, dear Reader, in almost every detail except for the apparent lack of a clitoris.

Oh, and size.

So, lady readers, if you are ever swimming with whales or dolphins, and you don’t want the National Parks service to have to take care of the results of cetacean attentions to your charms with a shotgun full of ‘anaesthetics’, i recommend adding a femidom to your swimsuit attire.

Also, the stretch marks associated with giving birth to a baby dolphin or humpback whale just don’t bear thinking about.

Yours,
Gullybogan

UPDATE

Sadly, Colin has had to be put down.