By Susan Milius
PORTLAND, Ore. — Crazily diverse shapes of male genitals across the animal kingdom — from curlicues and Y-tubes to multiknobbed, tendrilly whazzits — may evolve faster than any other animal structures. Biologists have spent more than a century debating how to explain such fast and extreme variation.
Now it’s time to search for explanations in two overlooked places: the female side of sex and the vast variety of places where animals live, researchers proposed early January at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology.