Gay Animals? Could It Be?
A few years ago Laura Bush, as first lady, praised Laysan albatross couples for making lifelong commitments to one another.
What Mrs. Bush did not realize, however, was that about 30% of these animals (who mate for the entirety of their 60-70 year lifespan) were same sex couples.
Lindsay C. Young is a biologist who has been researching the albatrosses since 2003. In the course of her doctoral work, Young and a colleague discovered, almost incidentally, that a third of the pairs at Kaena Point actually consisted of two female birds, not one male and one female. Laysan albatrosses are one of countless species in which the two sexes look basically identical. It turned out that many of the female-female pairs, at Kaena Point and at a colony that Young’s colleague studied on Kauai, had been together for as far back as the biologists’ data went. The female-female pairs had been incubating eggs together, rearing chicks and just generally passing under everybody’s nose for what you might call “straight” couples.
Couples preen each other’s feathers and engage in elaborate mating behaviors and displays. “Like when you’re in a couple,” biologist Marlene Zuk says. “All those sickening things that couples do that gross out everyone else but the two people in the couple? . . . Birds have the same thing.” Pairs are often seen sitting belly to belly, arching their necks and nuzzling together their heads to form a kind of heart shape.
Various forms of same-sex sexual activity have been recorded in more than 450 different species of animals.
One primatologist speculated that the real reason two male orangutans were fellating each other was nutritional.
A female koala might force another female against a tree and mount her, while throwing back her head and releasing what one scientist described as “exhalated belchlike sounds.”
Male Amazon River dolphins have been known to penetrate each other in the blowhole.
Needless to say, I will never have quite the same visual again when hearing the term ‘blow job’.
