Η ΟΜΟΦΥΛΟΦΙΛΙΑ ΣΤΑ ΖΩΑ 5

Can Animals Be Gay?
By Jon Mooallem (nytimes.com, 29/3/2010)
ABOUT TWO DOZEN birds were knocking around when Lindsay Young and I arrived at Kaena Point one afternoon. Young dished about a few of them — “Her mate didn’t show up last year”; “God, this one’s annoying” — as they waddled by. Laysan albatrosses are not nearly as graceful on land as they are in the air; even they seem surprised by the size of their feet. (Later that week, at a nearby resort, I would recognize their gait while watching an out-of-shape snorkeler toddle back to his beach towel in rented flippers.) “I’m just writing down who’s here,” Young said, reading the numbers on the birds’ leg bands and marking them on her clipboard. After trying and failing to get a clear view of one bird’s leg with binoculars, she finally just walked to within a few feet of the animal and leaned over to look.
This is the luxury of studying Laysan albatrosses. Having evolved with no natural predators, the birds have no fight-or-flight instinct — you can basically go right up to one and grab it. In fact, Young did just this a short while later, slinking up to a male on all fours, sweeping it in by its flank and, in one expert motion, straightjacketing the wings under one arm and clamping the beak shut in her other hand. Then, she walked over and handed the thing to me; she needed to take an expensive tracking device off the bird’s ankle. “Sorry, but it’s like watching a thousand-dollar bill fly around,” she said. She took some pliers from her backpack to twist off the anklet and, as I stood bear-hugging the albatross, she added: “They have a nice smell. It’s a little musty.”
Young and Marlene Zuk are now applying for a 10-year National Science Foundation grant to continue studying the female albatross pairs. One of the first questions they want to answer is how these birds are winding up with fertilized eggs. Typically, albatrosses fend off birds who aren’t their mates. So Young has been trying to determine if males who arrive back at the colony before their own partners do are forcing themselves on these females or whether these females are somehow “soliciting” the males for sex. She was staking out Kaena Point on a daily basis, trying to watch these illicit copulations unfold for herself. This was Young’s third year; so far, she’d only managed to see it happen twice.
Young and I ambled around for half an hour, maybe more. Then she pointed and, in a monotone, said, “So, that’s a female-female pair.” We crouched and watched the two birds, numbers 169 and 983. They sat under a spindly, native Hawaiian naio bush. They made baa sounds at each other. After a while, Young and I got up.
Another hour passed. (Usually, Young brings along a camping chair.) Occasionally, albatrosses danced in groups of two or three, raising their necks, groaning like vibrating cellphones, clacking their beaks or stomping. But most of the time, they didn’t do much at all. “I’ve spent a lot of my career watching animals not have sex,” Zuk later told me.
Homosexual activity is often observed in animal populations with a shortage of one sex — in the wild but more frequently at zoos. Some biologists anthropomorphically call this “the prisoner effect.” That’s basically the situation at Kaena Point: there are fewer male albatrosses than females (although not every male albatross has a mate). Because it takes two albatrosses to incubate an egg, switching on and off at the nest, a female that can’t find a male (or maybe, Young says, who can’t find “a good-enough male”) has no chance of producing a chick and passing on her genes. Quickly mating with an otherwise-committed male, then pairing with another single female to incubate the egg, is a way to raise those odds.
Still, pairing off with another female creates its own problems: nearly every female lays an egg in November whether she has managed to get it fertilized or not, and the small, craterlike nests that albatross pairs build in the dirt can accommodate only one egg and one bird. So Young was also trying to figure out how a female-female pair decides which of its two eggs to incubate and which to chuck out of the nest — if the birds are deciding at all, and not just knocking one egg out accidentally. From a strict Darwinian perspective, Young told me, “it doesn’t pay for one bird to incubate the other’s egg unless her partner is going to let her egg be incubated the following year.” But presumably, neither female bird knows whether an egg is hers or the other bird’s, much less whether it’s fertilized or not. A Laysan albatross just knows to sit on whatever’s under it. “They’ll incubate anything — I have a photo of one incubating a volleyball,” Young said.
And these were only preambles to more questions. With the male of an albatross pair replaced by another female, every step of the species’ normal, well-honed process for fledging a chick seemed suddenly to present a fresh dilemma. Ultimately, either the rules of albatrossdom were breaking down and the lesbian couples were booting up some alternate suite of behaviors, governed by its own set of rules, or else science had never thoroughly understood the rules of albatrossdom to begin with. And that’s the whole point, for Young: it’s the complexity and apparent flexibility of the species that fascinates her — the puzzle those female-female pairs create at Kaena Point just by existing. She’s not trying to explain homosexual behavior. She’s trying to explain the albatross. And that’s why the rest of the world’s politicized reaction to her work caught her by surprise.
Many people who contacted Young after the publication of her first albatross paper assumed she was a lesbian. She is not. Young’s husband, a biological consultant, was actually an author of the paper, along with Brenda Zaun (who is also not gay, for what it’s worth). Young found the assumption offensive — not because she was being mistaken for gay, but because she was being mistaken for a bad scientist; these people seemed to presume that her research was compromised by a personal agenda. Still, some of the biologists doing the most incisive work on animal homosexuality are in fact gay. Several people I spoke to told me their own sexual identities either helped spur or maintain their interest in the topic; Bruce Bagemihl argued that gay and lesbian people are “often better equipped to detect heterosexist bias when investigating the subject simply because we encounter it so frequently in our everyday lives.” With a laugh, Paul Vasey told me, “People automatically assume I’m gay.” He is gay, he added, but that fact didn’t seem to detract from his amusement.
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