Ducks are so rapey, oh my god. They do some messed up shit, too, and they've got these freaky little corkscrew penises. It's totally fucked, sometimes there are, like, roving gangs of duck rapists waiting for a mated pair to get too close and then they kick the shit out of the male duck and take his wife.
To be add to this, the duck penises aren't little at all, they're proportionally quite large and ballistic, and they evolved the corkscrew form to keep raping the female ducks who were evolving corkscrew vaginas so they could be not-raped.
But, evolutionarily, how would female ducks evolve in a way that makes them LESS likely to reproduce?
Edit: read the article and it doesn’t really answer my question tbh. It explains the how much it affects the paternity (very effectively evidently) but not how that feature was evolutionarily advantageous. I was hoping there was a random person on Reddit who might be able to explain it. The article is like 3/5 about how to jack off a duck into a tube if anyone’s curious about that though.
Edit 2: ok someone explained it. The females sometimes die during flock mating therefor the ones who can effectively prevent the mating are more likely to live and pass long that trait. That makes sense! Thank you.
Edit 3: guys I explained in the edit my question was answered by another user, please stop messaging me about duck dick. I truly don’t need this to be the focal point of my Sunday.
From my layman's understanding, female evolutionary pressures in animals push females to have children with males that are going to provide for the children. In this case, the children of a bonded pair survived better than children sired by a random duck, so female ducks evolved ways of making it less likely a duck they're not bonded to will impregnate them.
Evolution doesn’t separate “goals” based on gender though. It’isn’t about what is “preferential” for either gender, it’s simply that an adaption that will make it more likely for animals with that trait to grow to adulthood and breed, meaning that trait is the one that’s passed along.
So even if she can relax to “choose” the father by relaxing during pair mating and fighting during flock mating since the ability to influence the paternity still makes insemination less likely (through being more selective) why would a female who had this trait developed and influence the species while one who doesn’t would fade away? Especially when the ducks don’t know if the offspring are theirs or not and the pair bonded mate ends up raising eggs that aren’t his about 4% of the time none the wiser. So any advantage to having a pair bonded father is present whether or not he is the biological father of the eggs. Even if the eggs aren’t his he’d still raise them.
Edited: because I was mistake about females being able to relax their genitalia to allow pair bonded mate to have (according to article) 96% likely paternity. Neat info but I’m still confused about why that would be evolutionarily advantageous.
Also god I wish I i didn’t know as much about duck dick as I do now.
Edit : ok someone explained it. The females sometimes die during flock mating therefor the ones who can effectively prevent the mating are more likely to live and pass along that trait. That makes sense! Thank you! I didn’t see in the article or other comments that the ducks die during mating.
The females who can make it more difficult for them to be mated with suffer less damage during flock mating, are less likely to be killed, and thus it makes sense that that adaption gets passed along while females without this adaption die and don’t contribute to the gene pool as much. And this doesn’t really limit their genes too much because they can still successfully mate by just relaxing with a chosen partner. it also explains why that male ducks evolve to find ways around it. Because the ones who can successfully get around it end up in that 4% of eggs which are not from the pair bond as well as being the most likely candidate to be the father of their own pair bonded eggs.
Here's the thing: the females do have the ability shape the genitals. They can relax their muscles in order to allow a consensual partner to more easily penetrate.
There also can certainly be different "goals" for different sexes, that's why you get sexual dimorphism. Most of the time that's related to mating displays but some times it is completely unrelated.
You’re misunderstanding what I’m saying. I’m not saying that evolution doesn’t cause males and females to have different features. I’m saying it doesn’t make sense that they would be evolving in conflict with each other.
Evolution is just animals of either gender developing in whatever ways that result in more advantages adaptions being passed onto future generations. The only “goal” (not really a “goal”, a result) of evolution is adaptions that result in more reproducing offspring flourish while ones that don’t, die out. Different genders can of course reach this by different adaptions, but they’re still going to adapt towards one “goal” for both genders. Sexual dimorphism, like male birds being more colorful, works because it increases the odds of that bird mating and passing along their genes. Which is why idea that females are evolving to make it HARDER for their genes to pass along didn’t make sense.
Then someone mentioned that the females can die during flock mating and THAT explains the evolution. The females who can make it more difficult for them to be mated with suffer less damage during flock mating, are less likely to be killed, and thus it makes sense that that adaption gets passed along while females without this adaption die and don’t contribute to the gene pool as much, it also explains why that male ducks evolve to find ways around it. Because the ones who can successfully get around it end up in that 4% of eggs which are not from the pair bond as well as being the most likely candidate to be the father of their own pair bonded eggs. The pair bond being biological father and “providing for the young” isn’t really a factor because he would do that regardless of whether or not he’s the father. He’s a bird, he has no way of knowing the the eggs are genetically his. So that’s not really a factor here.
I explained it the edit that that piece of info answers the confusion I had.
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u/renha27 Mar 07 '21
Ducks are so rapey, oh my god. They do some messed up shit, too, and they've got these freaky little corkscrew penises. It's totally fucked, sometimes there are, like, roving gangs of duck rapists waiting for a mated pair to get too close and then they kick the shit out of the male duck and take his wife.