Gay Penguin Update

Several months ago a German zoo [Bremerhaven] was faced with a problem, or at least they thought they were. Six of its male penguins seemed to be gay and were forming same-sex pair bonds. In an effort to tempt them to go straight the zoo imported female penguins from Sweden. [here] At the time Bilious Young Fogey predicted that the experiment would fail. He was right. The gay penguins [assuming of course that that is an appropriate way to characterize them] resisted the charms of the Swedish temptresses. [here].

So, is this support for the proposition that sexual orientation is genetically or developmentally hard wired? Not necessarily. Now comes news of another instance of gay male penguins, this time from New York.

John Kass, writing in the Chicago Tribune reports:

Roy and Silo, the two famous gay penguins at New York's Central Park Zoo, are no longer a pair. Silo has gone straight.

They broke up after six years together. Once, they were provided a donated egg. They sat on it and hatched it and this was celebrated as some kind of penguin lifestyle choice in the New York Times on Feb. 7, 2004, under the headline "The Love that Dare Not Squeak Its Name."

But that's so over.

These days, Silo has a girlfriend. And Roy? Well, lately he has been observed hanging around a few sexually immature penguins, but he has no real prospects. It seems Roy is a troubled penguin.

"Silo found a young female. Her name is Scrappy," Rob Gramzay, the zoo's senior penguin keeper, told me in a phone interview on Tuesday. "They had an egg. It didn't work out and they might try again."

And Roy?

"Roy didn't really find anybody. He hung out with a few birds, half of them were female, half were male," Gramzay said. "He's not in a nesting situation. It's more for camaraderie."

Read the whole thing here.

So maybe sex roles are not pre-determined after all. Or, perhaps the whole gay-penguin thing tells us nothing at all about human sexuality, a point I advanced in my original post on the German zoo's experience.

John Kass also references the immensely popular movie, The March of the Penguins, and attempts by conservatives and liberals to find political or cultural meanings in it. [my review of the film is here] This is almost always a mistake. Penguins are not people and anthropomorphizing them is an exercise in self-delusion, a point brilliantly made by Carl Zimmer over at the Loom. He suggests that we can also derive life-lessons from:

Dinner of the Redback Spiders: This documentary follows the heartwarming romance between two spiders that ends with the male somersaulting onto the venomous fangs of his mate, his reproductive organs still delivering semen into the female as she devours him.

Toxic Love of the Fruit Flies: In this movie, male fruit flies demonstrate their ingenuity and resourcefulness by injecting poisonous substances during sex that make it less likely that other males will successfully fertilize the eggs of their mates. Sure, these toxins cut the lifespan of females short, but who said life was perfect?

Harem of the Elephant Seals: Meet Dad: a male northern elephant seal who spends his days in bloody battles with rivals who would challenge his right to copulate with a band of females—but doesn’t life a finger (or a flipper) to help raise their kids.

Step-fathers of the Serengeti: Guess who’s moving in? It’s a male lion taking over a pride of females. Watch him affirm traditional norms by killing their cubs so that they can father his own offspring.

Funky Love of the Bonobos: The sexual shenanigans of some of our closest living ape relatives. Male-female, female-female, and on and on it goes. Warning: Definitely not suitable for children.

Read the whole thing here. And while you're there check around his site. He writes wonderfully and lucidly on a wide range of scientific topics.