You ever find yourself watching a necropsy of a charismatic marsupial only to notice an excessive number of vaginas? You haven't? Well that's ok, because the BBC has an entire show dedicated to just such an endeavor. Inside Nature's Giants is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, and while I thought they couldn't top making a dead line roar by hooking it's vocal chords up to an air pump, they somehow have managed to go above and beyond by going down under and below the belt.Turns out amongst their other reproductive oddities, kangaroos and other marsupials have multiple vaginas for maximum reproductive efficiency! I'll explain how it works since you can't stream the TV show from the US. There is the central vagina, which the utero-joey travels through between the uterus and the birth canal, then there are two side vaginas which carry sperm to the uteruses. That yields a grand total of THREE vaginas. And yes, most male marsupials have a pronged member for dual-canal access.So what does it all mean? Well, it is presented as potentially one of the reasons most marsupials are born very premature relative to placental mammals. Our fused structure gives the fetus some room to grow, but that’s not the case with the thin central vagina the joey must traverse. Granted, the joey has a pouch to hang out in until they're able to hop around, but it is the task of the recently born to crawl their way from birth canal to pouch, which may also explain why marsupials are born with better developed forelimbs relative to us weak eutherians. This ultimately makes mama-roos serious multi-taskers, able to raise kids conveyor belt style: one joey out hopping around, one in the pouch, and one in the vaginal pipeline ready to be born.And to think you were nervous your parents would love you less when your sibling was born; at least you weren't being kicked out of the only pouch home you'd ever knownFollow Ryan Haupt on Twitter: @Haupt.
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