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Chapter 1: What historical evidence exists for same-sex behavior in animals?
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Hello, duckers. And Joan's here in the What the Duck taxi. Jump in. We're going to the pub. I'm taking you along to a Mardi Gras event from the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales. They call it Wildlife at the Watering Hole. And you're going to hear all about same-sex pairings and behaviour in nature.
The University of New South Wales PhD candidates you'll hear from will use words like gay and lesbian because it makes things more interesting for the story, right? But they did want me to tell you that they know they're anthropomorphising. So strap in or on if you like.
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Chapter 2: How has societal perception influenced the documentation of same-sex animal behavior?
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. 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. But the suppression had worked so well that it was a lot of scientists and the public's first interaction with this idea. And so the public had some thoughts. People took out letters condemning the research.
We got a beautiful article with the title of your tax dollars wasted studying gay goals, which personally I don't think is a waste, but that's just me. On the other side, there were several people who were neutral to very positive about the research. A lot of farmers were like, yeah, duh. We've been seeing this in our domesticated animals for a really long time.
So they would write into the researchers and say, this is what my rams do. On the other side... a lot of the queer community was thrilled because at the time, the main argument against homosexuality in people was that it was unnatural. And here was pretty irrefutable proof that it was natural. So obviously we know that it didn't end homophobia, even though we had some brief hope there.
But what it did do is usher in some really cool research by the rest of the scientific community.
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Chapter 3: What are the various forms of suppression affecting the study of homosexual behavior in animals?
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. 59% of the population on the whole was female. And of the albatross pairs that were counted, 31%, so almost a third, were lesbians. One couple in particular had been observed together for 18 years. So this isn't just a one-off for a season, this is the long-term commitment. And don't get me started on the microbes.
Okay, I'll start. Just briefly, microbes which are living things generally too small to see with the naked eye. So typically, you'd think of bacteria, viruses, and some fungi. They throw what we considered normal straight in the bin. And a few of my favorite examples that relate to pairing include, one, rainbow families, or as we scientists call them, biofilms.
They live in multi-species communities. And these exist in deep-sea hydrothermal vents, in our guts, in most animals' guts, in their skin, in dogs' snouts, on your teeth. This is the typical way that most microorganisms live, and it provides security, structure, and a place to share resources and skills.
The other thing is the microbiome, and I wanted to bring that up because it questions where our edges are and what it is to be whole. We know that microbiomes are essential for health. Without an intact microbiome, we probably wouldn't live. If we're thinking about successfully raising young, it's not just...
the human parents, but a whole multi-species assemblage of microorganisms that we also need to be involved in the parenting. So is it a sperm provider that's really doing a lot of the care, or is it actually the bifidobacterium that helps form a successful digestive system that produces a healthy offspring? And finally, microbes are... non-normative in how they reproduce.
They can reproduce sexually, they can clone themselves asexually, and they can also pass on and swap genetic information without reproducing at all. Some fungi also have a huge number of sexual types, both macroscopic fungi, things like mushrooms that you recognise, but also things like my favourite, Basidiomycete, Oostelagomatis or Cornsmut.
This smutty delicacy, and I have actually tried it and it's delicious, has over 50 mating types or kind of sexes. They live as free living individuals in soil, but then when they infect corn, they go into what's called a filamentous or kind of like...
long, skinny, infectious state, infect the corn, and then fill these corn cells with billions and billions of microscopic and actually quite delicious fungal spores. That's it for microbes. To wrap up, I'd just like to say that successfully raising young is essential to a species' survival, and parents can be queer for all manner of reasons.
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