Lucien Alperstein

speaker

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

Lucien Alperstein’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

So in the early 1900s, he went on an expedition to Antarctica and observed same-sex behaviours in Adelie penguins.

He was shocked and upset, calling these acts depraved.

He was so secretive about this that he recorded his observations in Greek, took them back to London, and then presented them to his peers.

And they all decided that this was too much for the general public.

So a bit of overt suppression happening here.

Luckily, two of the original copies of these notes survived and have been

circulated and so we now know that amongst many other things these penguins were up to some pretty normal natural homosexual behaviour.

The iconic Western Australian black swans.

People originally thought that black swans formed pairs for life, both romantically and sexually monogamous.

However, these swans have been tagged for some time and in this particular population a quarter of the swans were actually male-male pairs.

When the scientists looked at how successful they were at raising their young, they saw that male-male or gay pairs were

actually more successful, having an 80% success rate in raising their young to the fledging stage compared to 30% for the heterosexual couples.

So there are a few hypotheses.

One is that the males are more aggressive, so are better at fending predators off.

And the other is that male pairs are actually choosing to be parents.

So it could just be because they actually care a lot about them and are willing to put in the effort.

They get the number one dad award.

Daphne mentioned the gulls before.

They walked so that the lace and albatrosses could run.

This population of lace and albatrosses in Hawaii were a sex-skewed population.

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