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The male American alligator, Alligator mississippiensis, keeps its penis erect but tucked inside its body until mating.


Alligators That Are Always Erect

'''Male American alligators are always prepared. Most—if not all—other animal penises inflate from a flaccid state, but gators keep theirs permanently erect.

And that’s not all—the penis shoots out from inside the animal’s body and then bounces back like a rubber band. Diane Kelly, a researcher and animal phallus expert from the University of Massachusetts, told National Geographic in 2013 that this “permanently erect bungee” penis is “really weird.”'''


More than 10,000 reptile species in every shape and size scurry and slither across Earth, from garter snakes to crocodiles — and their nether regions are just as wildly varied.


Kelly has a theory about how a permanently erect “almost free-floating” penis with no muscle attached to it is able to extrude from the animal’s cloaca. After seeing this video, she hypothesized that a pair of muscles cradling the penis—the levator cloacae—contract to force the penis out.


So far, the phenomenon has also been observed in Nile and Australian saltwater crocodiles. “We expect that it’s true of all crocodilians,” Kelly says via e-mail.

She’s still working to get live, sexually mature specimens to test her hypothesis. Kelly notes that while the penis itself is permanently erect, the glans—that bulbous structure at the tip—does inflate, and each species has its own look and shape.

From spiky penises to multiple penises—or none at all—reptiles have some of the most unusual mating gear on Earth. (Learn how lizard genitalia became a black-market craze.)

Most of the current knowledge of reptilian genitalia focuses on male parts, but scientists are turning more and more to the study of their female counterparts—it’s just a bit trickier since female parts are situated inside the animal.
Two Is Better Than One

Snakes and lizards have not just one, but two penises, called hemipenes.

University of Sydney researcher Christopher Friesen says having two hemipenes may benefit males during mating.


“In the case of the garter snakes I have studied, being able to mate from on one side of the female or the other might be useful in intense mating competition,” he says.

That’s because the snakes form what Friesen calls “massive mating aggregations” in which from five to 100 males compete for a single female by searching for her within the mating ball. “It might be advantageous to be flexible about which side of the female a male finds himself, because they use the hemipenis closest to the female to mate.” (Read about a pit filled with 75,000 mating garter snakes.)


And it’s not just males that are doubling up. Female lizards and snakes have two clitorises, or hemiclitores, which were first described in female monitor lizards in 1995 by W. Böhme as “miniaturized mirror images of the hemipenes of the males.”

Hemiclitores and their functions are still “poorly known” but should be considered a defining characteristic of female lizards and snakes, researchers Soledad Valdecantos and Fernando Lobo of the Universidad Nacional de Salta in Argentina reported in a 2014 study.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/02/snakes-alligators-reptiles-genitalia-animals/

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