Daphne Willemsen

You're not meant to put judgment on these words.

Words like strange, bizarre, perverse, inappropriate, and my personal favourite, unnatural, for things seen in nature, used to describe behaviours that animals are doing.

The best example of this is the very real paper, A Note on the Apparent Lowering of Moral Standards in the Lepidoptera, which, if you don't know what lepidoptera are, that's our butterflies.

LAUGHTER

So, we've had 700 years of suppression, but us today know that at least 1500 species are gay.

How did we get there?

Partially, it's thanks to the 1977 study on lesbian seagulls.

Married couple, George and Molly Hunt, studying Western gulls off the coast of California.

they noticed roughly 14% of the birds have what they call a supernormal clutch.

That is when you have double the number of eggs you would expect.

A normal clutch for these birds has two to three eggs.

Supernormal clutch will have four, five, or six.

And so that's quite odd for these birds.

It's hard to pop out double the number of babies you would expect.

They caught two of the pairs of the birds sitting on a supernormal clutch, and they opened the birds up, and they were expecting to see something funky going on with their reproductive tract.

They opened up the first bird.

It had a normal female reproductive tract.

They opened up the second bird, and you guys can probably already guess it had a normal female reproductive tract.

So being scientists, they decided to collect some more data.

They found a way to do it that didn't involve killing every bird on the island.