The largest balls in the world: the bush cricket Platycleis affinis, apparently, has the largest testicles around. 70 mg may not sound like much, but it’s an impressive fourteen percent of the cricket’s body mass. A little back-of-the-envelope calculation of what a human male would have to sport in order to compete: assuming the average male weighs 75 kg, he would have to have balls weighing 75/100*14 = 10.5 kilograms. If this mass were to be concentrated in an average pair of testicles, whose volume is about 36 cm3, the density would be 10500g/36cm3 = 292g/cm3. That’s twice as dense as the core of the Sun.
The guys who measured bush cricket balls didn’t do it just to settle who’s bigger. They found “that testis mass increased with the degree of polyandry, but decreased with increasing ejaculate mass.”
dailymeh posted this on January 18, 2012
