Scientists have found that snakes do have clitoris, shattering a long-held assumption that females lack sex organs.
The research published Wednesday provides the first anatomically correct descriptions of the genitals of female snakes.
Snake penises – hemipenis – have been studied for decades. They are forked and some have spikes.
But the female sex organ had been “neglected in comparison”, according to the researchers.
It’s not necessarily that he was elusive, but rather that the scientists weren’t really looking for him.
“There was a combination of the fact that female genitalia were taboo, that scientists mightn’t find them, and that people accepted the mislabeling of snakes as intersex,” says Megan Folwell, PhD student and lead researcher.
The article she co-authored and published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B locates the clitoris in the tail of a female snake.
Snakes possess two individual clitoris – the hemiclitores – separated by tissue and hidden on the underside of the tail. According to the researchers, the double-walled organ is made up of nerves, collagen and red blood cells, which corresponds to erectile tissue.
Ms Folwell says she started researching it because the literature she read regarding snakes’ female sex organs – that they didn’t have any or had been eliminated by evolution – “didn’t sit right with me. at all,” she said.
“I know he [le clitoris] is present in many animals and it doesn’t make sense that it’s not present in all snakes,” she said.
“I just had to take a look, to see if that structure was there or if it had just been missed,” she says.
She started with a viper and found the clitoris – a heart-shaped structure – fairly immediately, near the snake’s scent glands that serve to attract mating partners.
“There was this fairly prominent double structure in the female, which was quite different from that of the surrounding tissues – and there was no involvement of the structures [du pénis] that I had seen before.”
His team then verified this phenomenon on a variety of snakes – dissecting a total of nine species, including the carpet python, the puff pit viper and the cantilever pit viper. The hemicliters varied in size but were distinct.
Rewrite the subject on the sex of snakes
This discovery paves the way for new theories regarding snake sex, which might involve the stimulation and pleasure of females.
Until now, scientists thought that sex in snakes was “primarily a matter of coercion and the male snake forcing mating,” says Ms Folwell.
This was because the male snakes were usually quite physically aggressive during mating, while the female was more “placid”.
“But now, with the discovery of the clitoris, we can begin to think of seduction and stimulation as another form of female willingness and likelihood to mate with the male,” she adds.
It also sheds new light on the snakes’ supposed foreplay. Male snakes often coil around their partner’s tail – where the clitoris is – and pulsate.
“There are a lot of behaviors that can indicate that they are there to stimulate the female.”
Ms Folwell says the discovery has been received positively in the world of snake science – “a bit shocked that it has been ignored for so long, but also surprised because its existence makes sense”.
She notes that in some species of snakes, the clitoris is fragile and particularly small – less than a millimeter.
There was also a prevailing belief that female snakes had a smaller version of the male hemipene, as is the case with monitor lizards. As such, in some studies of intersex snakes, scientists had mislabeled a hemipene as a hemicliter.
One of the project’s other researchers, Professor Kate Sanders from the University of Adelaide, said the discovery would not have happened without Ms Folwell’s “fresh perspective”.
“This discovery shows how much science needs diverse thinkers with diverse ideas to progress.”