Gay mating
Gay Lions? Not Quite
A photograph of two male lions seemingly in an amorous embrace has some humans clutching their pearls.
After the release of the photograph, taken in August at Kenya's Masai Mara National Reserve, Ezekiel Mutua, the chief executive of the Kenya Film Classification Board, blamed humans (or maybe demons) for the male-on-male mounting.
"[P]robably, they have been influenced by gays who have gone to the national parks and behaved badly," Mutua told Nairobi News, before suggesting that the lions be isolated and studied because the "demonic spirits inflicting in humans seem to possess now caught up with animals."
You may enjoyThe actual story behind the photograph shows that Mutua got some things wrong. The mounting action isn't actually sexual. And the official jumped the gun on attributing human motivations to animal action, experts said. ['Gay' Animals: 10 Alternative Lifestyles in the Wild]
"It's rare, it's not really sexual and it tells us a lot more about those officials in Kenya and their homophobia than anything else," Craig Packer, the director of the Lion Research Center at the University of Minnesota, told Live Science. "It's a bizarre overreactio
Humpback whales photographed having sex — and gay sex — for the first time
Photographers have captured two male humpback whales having sex, in what experts say is the first time the species has been documented exhibiting sexual activity of any kind.
The social deed of humpback whales has been studied and chronicled for decades. But in a study released this week in the journal Marine Mammal Science, the authors said they’ve produced the first photographs of this species having penetrative sex.
The report’s three authors are marine biologist Stephanie Stack and the two photographers who captured the encounter, Lyle Krannichfeld and Brandi Romano, in waters west of the Hawaiian island of Maui in January 2022.
“We realized adorable quickly that there was a scientific significance to it,” Krannichfeld, 44, said. “Even if there were no articles published or nothing ever came of it, we knew that it was important to the scientific community and those who were studying the whales just because of the unique behavior.”
The encounter occurred between one male whale who appeared unhealthy or injured and a strong and healthy male whale, the report stated. The whale that received penet
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How gay is nature, really? In this exclusive excerpt of his book, A Little Gay Innate History, Josh Davis shines a light on the diversity of sex and sexual behaviour that’s always been observable in character, for those who have been willing to look…
The planet on which we live is filled with an extraordinary range of animals, plants and fungi. Collectively, they exhibit an astonishing diversity when it comes to what they look like, where they live and how they conduct oneself. And nowhere is this truer than when it comes to their sex and sexual behaviours.
Just how common are gay behaviours in nature?
It’s often quoted that around 1,500 species of animals show some form of lesbian behaviour. This includes animals from right across the tree of life: Hawaiian orb weaver spiders and common slipper shells, dwelling flies, nematode worms and Humbolt squid, wood turtles, blackstripe topminnows, Guianan cock of-the-rocks and brown bears.
But this figure is likely a massive underestimate. Considering these behaviours are found in almost every branch of the evolutionary tree, it seems highly unlikely that they are limited to just a few hundred species out of some 2.13 million named to date.