The piece talked about how this discovery was going to radically change the way we conceptualize conception. I had never heard anything like it before or since, and now really wish I had saved the article.

Spark’s right; one of the funny things I found in searching on sperm competition is that in the primate family there’s a direct evolutionary cause-and-effect between the size of the male’s junk and female monogamy. Chimp females mate promiscuously, so the males have evolved huge testicles and ejaculate huge quantities of semen in order to give them a better shot–so to speak–at fertilization. In gorilla society, though, the alpha male dominates the females so that they don’t routinely mate with other males and, not surprisingly, gorillas have relatively small testicles and quantities of ejaculate. Humans fall in the middle of the two extremes.

Anyways, the effect in us is nowhere near what other species go through for sperm competition. In one of my bio labs in college, the professor warned the men of the immasculating effect of comparing our sperm size against other species’.

Dragonflies have barbed hooks on the male organ to scrape out semen before ejaculating himself. A male coyote’s penis swells after ejaculation, lodging his member in the female until such time as it’s virtually guaranteed that his won’t be out-competed by the next guy.

It looks painful for all parties. I’m pretty sure I’d like sex a lot less if it worked like this for us.

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2008/11/21