Iceland is home to the world's only Tintin Museum. Exhibits include more than 200 mammalian tintins (55 of which belong to whales), models and artworks about tintin, and models of fantasy creatures (such as elves and trolls). The largest exhibit in the museum is the Tintin of the Blue Whale, an incomplete specimen measuring 1.7 meters long and estimating that the entire organ is 5 meters long, making it great even among the world's largest animals.
Collection of the Tintin Museum in Iceland, Tintin of the Blue Whale | Richard Gould / Wikimedia Commons
Today's protagonist walrus has a unique tintin bone, up to 60 centimeters in length, accounting for 18% of the body length, and is the most powerful in terms of absolute and relative size among mammals. The Inuit used this bone as a cane.
Toulouse Museum Collection, Tintin Bones of Walrus | Didier Descouens / Wikimedia Commons
If the scope is expanded beyond mammals, the form of tintin is more colorful. Barnacles can reach 8 times the length of the body; some bean girls have a swollen "balloon" on the tink, and the surface of the balloon has sharp horns and hard hairs; the tintin of the brown hard-tailed duck (Oxyura jamaicensis) is not only long, but also twisted into a curved spiral.
Please don't say it again! | Manga "Heaven and Earth Creation Design Department"
< h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > selection-driven Tintin Wars</h1>
Tintin and tinting bone are important bases for species classification, because even for animals that are very closely related, the size and structure of tintin can vary widely. The diversity of forms suggests that Tintin evolved so rapidly that we didn't know until recently that the driving force behind it was mainly sexual selection. Some sexual choices have a simple driving force, such as barnacles are fixed life, and whiplash is not long. But when it comes to competition between the same kind, the animal's moves become rich, weird, and rolled up.
The proposer of the theory of sexual selection, Darwin's ancestors considered similar competition. However, Darya only thought of such pure forms as "a deer with big horns can fight and defeat enemies" or "a bird that sings well can attract girls". These are all sexual choices that occur before mating. For the selection of tintin, it usually occurs after mating or during mating.
Collection of the Tintin Museum in Iceland, The Tintin of the Whales | Gu Yourong
Sexual selection after mating/mating, the main forms are sperm competition and secret female selection (cryptic female choice). The former is a male animal competing for the wind and jealousy, trying to make her sperm selected, the latter is a female attempt to choose the sperm of Lang Jun, but the male tries to control the female and make her accept her sperm.
For example, the strange shape of The Bean Lady Can bring out the semen of the previous male Bean Lady from the female's body (kuǎi). The brown hard-tailed duck's Tintin is unusually flexible and good at drilling gaps, and the female duck's vagina is long and curved, which is a specially set level to prevent any male duck from injecting semen into it.
Tests by Patricia L. R. Brennan et al. of Yale University on Cairina moschata show that its flexibility | Carl Zimmer / vimeo
Inner volumes, in fact, are all inner volumes
Like humans, competition between the same kind will inevitably lead to "involution". Everyone is tired enough to compete for limited resources, and they still get as much. Evolutionary biology calls this phenomenon an "arms race," or "the Red Queen Theory" (my ID is really unlucky).
For example, the more females mate with, the more fierce the competition, and the more extreme the development of the form of tintin, as well as other reproductive organs. Conversely, the fewer females mate with, the smaller and less interesting the tintin. Comparative studies of pinniped suborders (walruses, seals, sea lions) found that males were inversely correlated "relative to the female's size" and "the size of the genitals (butadium and testes)". In other words, big guys don't have big guys. This actually reflects two forms of inner curl: some pinniped suborders choose to increase their body size and beat their lovers away, giving them the opportunity to inseminate exclusively for females, while others use larger tintin and sperm volumes to increase the chance of "winning the bid".
Tintin Competition. Picture A is the small spotted-backed diving duck (Aythya affinis), whose courtship competition is not as fierce as that of the brown hard-tailed duck, and Tintin is much smaller. Figure C The blue beak is a brown hard-tailed duck with a great tintin, and the grey beak is a juvenile brown hard-tailed duck, tintin has not yet grown, only a little | Patricia L. R. Brennan et al. / The Auk (2017)
Tintin's inner curls compete, sometimes violently to the point where females are injured. A class of beetles called called callosobruchus spp., some species of tintin are full of thorns that can poke at the female's reproductive tract. The more destructive Tintin is, the higher the chance that it will conceive a female, probably because the stabbed female has difficulty mating with other males. However, females also have countermeasures, the longer the butter the thorn, the harder the female vaginal epidermis, the so-called lower countermeasures.
The females who participate in the inner volume will also kill back. The 2017 Funny Nobel Prize was awarded to a study of female insects growing tintin. The scientific name neotrogla curvata is a rodent insect. The female's external genitalia are large and prominent, with insertion functions, and barbs that hold themselves firmly to the male — scientists have accidentally torn the male in half when they tried to separate two mating insects — a weapon that the female developed to compete for sperm. They live in an environment where food is scarce, and only a small part of the sperm that females get from males is used for insemination, and most of them are used as nutrients for themselves. Therefore, after encountering the male insect, it is inseparable that the female will control it with advanced "weapons" and let it be inseminated.
The external genitalia of special rodents, the female is large and complex, and the male is very simple | Kazunori Yoshizawa et al. / Current biology: CB (2014)
At the end of the day, in the inner volume race for sexual selection, it is not comprehensive to focus only on the genitals of male animals. In 2014, marine zoologist Dara Orbach solicited female whale genitalia online — stranded whales are generally studied anatomically — and she wanted to leave the dissected female reproductive system behind and courier it to her. The structure of the whale's reproductive tract is very strange, curved and full of folds. If you remember the brown hard-tailed duck, you can roughly guess that this is the result of competition between females and males, but we don't know the specific process, and it is precisely because we don't understand that we have to ask for specimens for research.
The curved vagina of the harbor porpoise (Phocoena phocoena) | Dara N Orbach et al. / Scientific Reports (2020)
In 2019, the world's first vagina museum opened in London, what will be next? Wait and see!
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