Pensioner records bat sex in church attic, helps scientists solve mystery of species’ ‘super long’ penis

Scientists have solved the mystery of one of the animal kingdom’s most disproportionately large penises thanks to a Dutch pensioner who records bat sex in a church attic.

The serotonin bat does not use its oddly large penis for penetration, but instead as a “copulatory arm” during mating, a European team of researchers said Monday.

This is the first time that a mammal has been documented to reproduce without having penetrative sex, the researchers added.

The serotine bat, which has a wingspan of more than 14 inches, is common in forests in Europe and Asia.

Nicolas Fasel, a researcher knows SwitzerlandUniversity of Lausanne, told Agence France-Presse that his team had been working on the bat for years and had observed that its “penis is super long when it is erect.”

Their penises are about seven times longer than the vaginas of female serotonin bats, the researchers measured.

Even stranger, the head of the penis expands in the shape of a heart, making it seven times wider than their partner’s vagina.

The scientists were confused.

“There’s no way it can penetrate with this structure,” said Fasel, the first author of one new study in the journal Current Biology.

Relatively little is known about how bats mate because it is difficult to observe, and scientists could not see a way to solve this mystery.

But then Fasel received a strange-looking email.

“A bat porn box”

“Penis” was the first word in the email’s subject line, followed by something in Dutch, then the word “Eptesicus.”

“So I thought, OK, it looks like spam,” Fasel said.

However, Eptesicus is the genus of the serotine bat, so Fasel risked opening the email and viewing the videos inside.

“Then I was really surprised because we had our answer,” he said.

The email was from Jan Jeucken, a pensioner with no scientific background who lives in the southern village of Castenray in Netherlands.

Jeucken had become interested in a population of serotonin bats living in the attic of a local church, and had set up cameras recording massive amounts of footage.

Fasel said Jeucken’s “passion made him the best guy” to understand the bats, and the retiree was named a co-author of the study.

The researchers analyzed 93 mating events in the church attic, as well as four recorded at a bat rehabilitation center in war-torn Ukraine.

By filming through a lattice on which the bats climbed, the researchers could observe them mating.

Female seroton bats have a large membrane between their tail and ankles that they can use to protect their genitalia.

During mating, the males grab the females by the neck and use their large penis as an extra arm to reach around and remove this membrane, the researchers said.

“We postulate that the hair on the terminal swelling serves as a sensor to help locate the vulva,” write the authors of the study. “During this time, we noticed several social calls, probably issued by the female.”

Then follows a long, still embrace called “contact mating” in which sperm are transferred.

While this form of reproduction – also called “sewer kissing” – is common in birds, it had never before been observed in a mammal.

For serotonin bats, the process takes some time. The average session was 53 minutes, but the longest lasted almost 13 hours.

“It’s a really weird reproductive strategy, but bats are weird and have a lot of weird reproductive strategies,” Patty Brennan, a biologist at Mount Holyoke College who was not involved in the study, said. told the New York Timesadding, “I think there are probably a lot of weird morphologies and behaviors that we just don’t know about.”

Fasel speculated that the bats could use their unusually long cervix to hold on to the sperm of several different males for months before choosing which male to mate with.

It is possible that other bat species mate without penetration, Fasel said, adding that more research was needed.

“We could see that there are many, many species with quite strange penises,” he said.

The authors concluded that the study revealed “a novel copulatory pattern in mammals,” adding that further studies should focus on male competition as well as the role played by pre- and post-copulatory female choice.

To better understand the mating behavior of the serotonin bat, Fasel told Live Science that he and his colleagues are “trying to develop a bat porn box that will be like an aquarium with cameras everywhere.”