Week 2: Meet the Organ Systems

Week 2!

I don't know about you, but in typical daily conversations and interactions, I rarely have to talk about (let alone consider) the reproductive system.  I am a biology teacher, mind you, and I have been roped into teaching the occasional health class... ...so I probably have more 'exposure' to the various systems and workings of the body than others.  That said, I know of no more powerful words to quiet a class of sixteen-year-olds than the litany of those found in any labeled male and female anatomy diagram.

Students a bit unfocused?  See if you can work the words "uterus, vas deferens, testicle, or ovary" into your lesson.  Thunderous silence will follow.  (Fun times.  Don't over use it.)

For even I, as a biology teacher, have a fairly comic sense of the systems of the body.  I had an excellent health teacher in junior high, but for some reason I still picture the uterus as a moose, even though Mrs. Jones drew anatomically correct diagrams on the board, and didn't allow any of us to goof off.  As for male anatomy, and the rather mystifying pathways of tubes?  Equally confounding.

Here is what I remember:

Meet the systems, CNP, 2014

See what I mean?  We may have a foundation in anatomy, but for most of us our knowledge is full of scattered random facts and information.  For example:

• Somewhere along the way, I found out that fallopian tubes were the diameter of a hair, and sperm actually meet the egg along that pathway.  
• Many male mammals (but not humans) actually have a bone in their penis called a baculum-- rodents, canids (dogs), felids, and all primates except for spider monkeys and humans.  In fact, a 4.5 foot long walrus baculum was sold at a Beverly Hills auction in 2007 for $8000... ...purchased by the Ripley's Believe It or Not museum's parent company.  
• Many animals are hermaphrodites, such as earthworm and snails.  Each individual must mate with another member of their species, and then both individually have the capacity to lay fertilized eggs.

http://sciencestuffbyamy.blogspot.com

• Other animals have the ability to reproduce through parthenogenesis--no mating required!  The females of species like the crustacean daphnia and the small parasitic wasp Nasonia can bear young without sexual reproduction.  

• Female kangaroos have three vaginas, and male kangaroos have "two-pronged" penises.  This might seem odd, until you consider the fact that 1 in 2,000 women have double uteruses.  

See what I mean?  I think our collective knowledge of our own bodies is a crazy amalgamation of odd facts, some real science, and probably a lot of nonsense thrown in.  Either way, we still go about making egg or sperm, and then preparing for what is to come.  

Well, our bodies do, at least.  As for me this week?

Week 2, CNP, 2014.

Until next week, 
Cat