When animals come out of the closet


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This will mess up some religious minds:

The laysan albatross is a downy seabird with a seven-foot wingspan and a notched, pale-yellow beak. Every November, a small colony of albatrosses assembles at a place called Kaena Point, overlooking the Pacific at the foot of a volcanic range, on the northwestern tip of Oahu, Hawaii. Each bird has spent the past six months in solitude, ranging over open water as far north as Alaska, and has come back to the breeding ground to reunite with its mate. Albatrosses can live to be 60 or 70 years old and typically mate with the same bird every year, for life. Their "divorce rate", as biologists term it, is among the lowest of any bird.

When I visited Kaena Point in November, the first birds were just returning. There are about 120 breeding albatrosses in the colony, and gradually, each will arrive and feel out the crowd for the one other particular albatross it has been waiting to have sex with again. Once together, pairs will copulate and collaboratively incubate a single egg for 65 days.

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In the course of her doctoral work, Young and a colleague discovered, almost incidentally, that a third of the pairs at Kaena Point actually consisted of two female birds, not one male and one female. Laysan albatrosses are one of countless species in which the two sexes look basically identical. It turned out that many of the female-female pairs, at Kaena Point and at a colony that Young's colleague studied on Kauai, had been together for four, eight or even 19 years ? as far back as the biologists' data went, in some cases. The female-female pairs had been incubating eggs together, rearing chicks and just generally passing under everybody's nose for what you might call "straight" couples.

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A discovery like Young's can disorient a wildlife biologist in the most thrilling way ? if he or she takes it seriously, which has traditionally not been the case. Various forms of same-sex sexual activity have been recorded in more than 450 different species of animals by now, from flamingos to bison to beetles to guppies to warthogs. Within most species, homosexual sex has been documented only sporadically, and there appear to be few cases of individual animals who engage in it exclusively.

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if two female birds are incubating eggs and raising young together, I have a strong suspicion that one of those birds went outside of an exclusive relationship to mate.

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if two female birds are incubating eggs and raising young together, I have a strong suspicion that one of those birds went outside of an exclusive relationship to mate.

Not necessarily it seems:

Gay penguins steal eggs from straight couples

A couple of gay penguins are attempting to steal eggs from straight birds in an effort to become "fathers", it has been reported.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3530723/Gay-penguins-steal-eggs-from-straight-couples.html

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I'd be interested to know about the eggs they are rearing--whether one of them got knocked up or if they are nicked from other nests.

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  • 6 months later...

Well reading articles about two male vultures that share a nest makes me think "don't you have to have sex to be considered homosexual?" The two vultures aren't having sex, they are simply living together for companionship. That's not the same as being gay. Just like the female birds mentioned above, they aren't being homsexual. I'm sure no one's ever seen a female peguin go down on another female penguin, or engage in some scissoring. The male situtation is also true. Stop saying animals are homsexual when they are not.

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