The other night while we were out seeing Mandy Patinkin, Madison and Ella watched some of the new NetFlix video, David Attenborough's The Life of Mammals Disk 3 with the babysitter, Hye Yon. (We all love David Attenborough's series -- we can't decide whether this one is best or The Life of Birds.) We asked her after the kids had gone to bed how it was, and Hye Yon momentarily got an odd look on her face, though didn't comment specifically.
This morning, the girls were telling us that they'd finally seen the segment on whales, which we'd all been anticipating.
"And," Ella said enthusiastically, "the humpbacked whale has a penis that goes back all the way inside him! It stays there until he wants to mate."
(This may explain Hye Yon's uncertainty at how to answer our question.)
We all spent a few minutes musing about why the penis goes completely back inside most of the time. I said maybe it's a streamlining thing, how it might slow him down when swimming. "You know, things dangling off you probably get in the way of going fast." David said it may be to protect the whale's reproductive capacity; if he wasn't able to draw it back in, it might get damaged while swimming, and then it couldn't reproduce.
"In that case," said Madison, "he might as well kill himself."
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