Daphne Willemsen

speaker

93 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 26 Jun

Daphne Willemsen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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What The Duck?! · Gay animals: same-sex science · 26 Jun 2026 podcast

Went back and collected a couple more years of research, and they found four lines of evidence for why this was homosexual behavior in these birds.

One, they caught the birds.

So they just went and they looked at the birds sitting on normal nests versus supernormal nests and they counted how many were male or female.

So on a normal nest, they found that 60% of the birds were female.

On a supernormal nest, they found that 98.7% of the birds were female.

They caught 75 birds on supernormal nests and one was a male.

So I guess he was just a bit confused.

Then they looked at the period of time between new eggs popping up in the nest.

So a normal bird can lay an egg roughly once every two days.

But in these supernormal nests, eggs were appearing every day and sometimes even twice in one day, indicating that, as you'd expect, more than one bird was laying eggs.

Then they looked at the nest fertility.

Now, you'd expect that a heterosexual couple of birds would have roughly 100% fertility.

The homosexual couple would have zero.

And we've got 80% and 13% fertility.

But what they did observe was that the female-female pairs, one of the females would sometimes go off, mate with a male, and then, I guess like a sperm donor, come back with fertilized eggs.

Finally, they looked at the actual behavior of the birds.

And they found that the female-female pairs were displaying a lot of the same territory, courtship, and mating behaviors as the female-male couples.

So they took all of that data, and they published it in Science, which is huge.

And in their paper, they said that this was the first account of homosexual behavior in animals.

Now, if you were paying attention in my timeline, you know that's not actually true.

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