Recent same-sex couplings at New Yorks Central Park Zoo include
these two young male chinstrap penguins, Squawk and Milo.
Nicole Bengiveno New York Times/Redux
Two penguins native to Antarctica met one spring day in 1998 in a tank at the Central Park Zoo in midtown Manhattan. They perched atop stones and took turns diving in and out of the clear water below. They entwined necks, called to each other and mated. They then built a nest together to prepare for an egg. But no egg was forthcoming: Roy and Silo were both male.
Robert Gramzay, a keeper at the zoo, watched the chinstrap penguin pair roll a rock into their nest and sit on it, according to newspaper reports. Gramzay found an egg from another pair of penguins that was having difficulty hatching it and slipped it into Roy and Silo’s nest. Roy and Silo took turns warming the egg with their blubbery underbellies until, after 34 days, a female chick pecked her way into the world. Roy and Silo kept the gray, fuzzy chick warm and regurgitated food into her tiny black beak.
Like most animal species, penguins tend to pair with the opposite sex, for the obvious reason. But researchers are finding that same-sex couplings are surprisingly widespread in the animal kingdom. Roy and Silo belong to one of as many as 1,500 species of wild and captive animals that have been observed engaging in homosexual activity. Researchers have seen such same-sex goings-on in both male and female, old and young, and social and solitary creatures and on branches of the evolutionary tree ranging from insects to mammals.
Unlike most humans, however, individual animals generally cannot be classified as gay or straight: an animal that engages in a same-sex flirtation or partnership does not necessarily shun heterosexual encounters. Rather many species seem to have ingrained homosexual tendencies that are a regular part of their society. That is, there are probably no strictly gay critters, just bisexual ones. “Animals don’t do sexual identity. They just do sex,” says sociologist Eric Anderson of the University of Bath in England.
Nevertheless, the study of homosexual activity in diverse species may elucidate the evolutionary origins of such behavior. Researchers are now revealing, for example, that animals may engage in same-sex couplings to diffuse social tensions, to better protect their young or to maintain fecundity when opposite-sex partners are unavailable—or simply because it is fun. These observations suggest to some that bisexuality is a natural state among animals, perhaps Homo sapiens included, despite the sexual-orientation boundaries most people take for granted. “[In humans] the categories of gay and straight are socially constructed,” Anderson says.
What is more, homosexuality among some species, including penguins, appears to be far more common in captivity than in the wild. Captivity, scientists say, may bring out gay behaviors in part because of a scarcity of opposite-sex mates. In addition, an enclosed environment boosts an animal’s stress levels, leading to a greater urge to relieve the stress. Some of the same influences may encourage what some researchers call “situational homosexuality” in humans in same-sex settings such as prisons or sports teams.
Making Peace
Modern studies of animal homosexuality date to the late 19th century with observations on insects and small animals. In 1896, for example, French entomologist Henri Gadeau de Kerville of the Society of Friends of Natural Sciences and the Museum of Rouen published a drawing of two male scarab beetles copulating. Then, during the first half of the 1900s, various investigators described homosexual behavior in baboons, garter snakes and gentoo penguins, among other species. Back then, scientists generally considered homosexual acts among animals to be abnormal. In some cases, they “treated” the animals by, say, castrating them or giving them lobotomies.
At least one early report, however, was more than descriptive, yielding insight into the possible origins of the behavior. In a 1914 lab experiment Gilbert Van Tassel Hamilton, a psychopathologist practicing in Montecito, Calif., reported that same-sex behavior in 20 Japanese macaques and two baboons occurred largely as a way of making peace with would-be foes. In the Journal of Animal Behavior Hamilton observed that females offered sex to the more dominant macaques of the same sex: “homosexual behavior is of relatively frequent occurrence in the female when she is threatened by another female, but it is rarely manifested in response to sexual hunger.” And in males, he penned, “homosexual alliances between mature and immature males may possess a defensive value for immature males, since they insure the assistance of an adult defender in the event of an attack.”
PAGE 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next»
RSS Feeds
E-mail Newsletters
Blog
Podcasts
Mobile
Widgets
{USERNAME} at {FORMATTED_DATE}
The following is a direct response to this comment.{BODY}