Word: ovipositor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1936-1936
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...eggs, the tube lengthens and enables her to deposit her ova in the siphon of a fresh water mussel, among whose gills they ripen and hatch. Drs. Aaron Elias Kanter, Carl Philip Bauer & Arthur Herman Klawans of the University of Chicago discovered that a bitterling will stretch her ovipositor, whether or not she needs to lay eggs, if her bowl of water receives as little as one teaspoonful of urine from a pregnant woman. Female sex hormones apparently stimulate this indicator of pregnancy...
Subsequently the Chicago obstetricians discovered that male urine also caused the bitterling to project her ovipositor. This phenomenon was casually accepted at first as more evidence that males harbor chemical as well as emotional traces of femininity in their constitutions. When the urine of an occasional nonpregnant woman was discovered to be stimulating to the bitterling, experimenters admitted themselves bewildered. The bitterling lost her standing and the doe rabbit and mouse were reinstated as nature's best indicators of human pregnancy. But Obstetricians Kanter and Klawans pursued the matter with another research mate, Physiologist Broda Otto Barnes, secured further...