Want some elephant sperm?

If you want to collect sperm from a (captive) elephant, how do you do it? Luckily youtube provides the answer. It seems that manual stimulation of the penis (1) just doesn’t do it for elephants, and (2) is physically dangerous (read on), so you have to stick your arm into the animal’s rectum and vigorously stimulate its prostate gland. How vigorously? Watch the video. The eventual result – and I’m not entirely sure how long this takes – is ejaculation…

In order for mating to be successful then, the penis has to be both long and flexible. Naturally S-curved (with the tip pointing upwards), it can be up to 1 m long (some sources say up to 1.5 m) and have a girth of 16 cm. It has a Y-shaped external urethal opening and is controlled by a large levator penis muscle. The clitoris is also large, at a whopping 40 cm, and is manipulated by a levator clitoris muscle. Perhaps the most interesting bit of information (provided in the video by elephant reproduction expert Robert Hermes) is that, not only does manual stimulation fail to work on elephants, it’s also physically dangerous. Apparently there are parts of the elephant penis that, when touched, cause the organ to flick around with enough force to knock over an unwary veterinarian or even inflict a black eye.