Well I don’t know about you, but I think marine biology just got slightly more interesting. A 2005 paper observing a menage a trois coupling between right whales recently appeared online, with photos that are NSFW but only if your boss knows what you’re looking at or has a working knowledge of whale genitalia.

We’ve got a diagrammed version of the header below, so you can get an idea of who’s doing what here.

The paper was entitled ‘Observations of a Female North Atlantic Right Whale (Eubalaena glacialis) in Simultaneous Copulation with Two Males: Supporting Evidence for Sperm Competition” Aquatic Mammals, 2005.’  Which is far less exciting than ‘Two Whales One Blowhole,’ which is what I would have gone with, or any number of Moby Dick/Free Willy combinations, but that’s because science is boring. Threesomes are not, however.

Says Neurotic Physiology:

The penis is around 2-2.5m long. 15% of the male’s total length. Compare that to the human, average male human height, 1.75m (ish), average penis length, 0.15m = 8%. Buuuurn.

You can see the female on her back – circled in red is where the business is happening.

So yes, we’ve just put the ‘graphic’ in National Geographic.

[Neurotic Physiology]