A $10 sex toy is helping scientists study turtles
Imagine standing in a swamp in southeastern Oklahoma, up to your hips in muck. It’s humid and buggy, and a monotonous hum fills the air. But this buzz isn’t from insects or a moody rattlesnake.
It’s the sound of a shiny, 17-centimetre-long sex toy. Which you are currently applying to the genitals of a western chicken turtle. For science.
Curiously, this was the scene in 2014, as Donald McKnight, a herpetologist at Missouri State University, tested out a new, noninvasive method for figuring out whether turtles are female or male.
It might sound silly, but the reptiles can actually be pretty secretive about their gender. All of their relevant parts are hidden inside an orifice known as the cloaca, so scientists must rely on features such as shell shape, tail size, claw length and eye color for sexing. The trouble is, these indicators are not always clear, and sometimes an individual turtle will have one feature that indicates “boy” and another that points toward “girl.”
Failing external cues, the scientists could then opt to measure the turtle’s testosterone levels by drawing blood or by performing a cloacoscopy, which basically means inserting a small telescoping camera into the cloaca. These methods are understandably stressful for the reptiles, time-consuming and difficult to perform in the field. And that brings us to the vibrators. You see, if you can catch a glimpse of a turtle’s penis, then you don’t have to bother with all those other clues. But the reptiles have to be romanced.
But we’re still learning what exactly turns turtles on. Earlier studies have re- vealed that common snapping turtles will evert their penises if you gently bounce them up and down. And Cotinga River toadhead turtles have been known to, uh, reveal themselves after their necks and limbs are immobilized. Scientists have also used a technique called electroejaculation on Yangtze soft-shell turtles; it uses electrodes to coax the animal toward erection and eventually ejaculation. The fruits of such labours are then used to try to create more of those critically endangered turtles through artificial insemination attempts.
But in his study, McKnight found that a little battery-powered stimulation was enough to make most male turtles evert their penises. Some species, such as the spiny soft-shell turtles, responded quickly and robustly to any vibration on or around their tails, whereas other species, such as common musk turtles and Mississippi mud turtles, required a bit of foreplay first.
These species responded best to “moving the vibrator in slow, small circles on the abdominal and pectoral scutes,” or plates, McKnight wrote in a new paper on the method. (“Good vibrations: a novel method for sexing turtles” was published in the most recent issue of the journal Acta Herpetologica and included Hunter Howell, Ethan Hollender, and Day Ligon as co-authors).
“It was really just a matter of moving the vibrator around and trying different techniques until I found ones to which the turtles responded well,” McKnight said.
Surely, no one will buck at the notion of finding new and better ways to study wildlife. But c’mon. Did it have to be a shiny silver vibrator?
“Since this was a pilot study, we bought the cheapest, most generic vibrator we could find,” said McKnight, adding that the apparatus was purchased online for about $10. “We did get a visit from the department’s secretary, who wanted to know why we were using our funding to order a vibrator.”
McKnight said he’s already had someone call him “the vibrator guy” at a conference. Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, said he is aware of the study and deemed it “clearly a worthy candidate for an Ig Nobel Prize.” (Previous Ig Nobel Prize winners include the scientists who discovered dogs tend to align their bodies on the North-South axis when they poop and those who found that nearly all mammals empty their bladders in 21 seconds.)
“I hope this won’t be my only lasting contribution to science, but I’m certainly proud to have it on my CV,” said McKnight.
So what’s next for Team Turtle Vibrator? McKnight says more testing in the field — perhaps with different styles of vibrators — is needed to nail down the best method for each species.
For what it’s worth, McKnight has no qualms about forging ahead with this line of inquiry.
“I think it is really important for people to occasionally see science and scientists like this. There is this stereotype that scientists are really rigid, awkward and detached from the society, and it’s just not true,” McKnight said. “We are normal people who just enjoy asking questions about the world around us and looking for answers to those questions. We enjoy jokes and comically absurd situations just as much as anyone else.”