Short Wave - Celebrate Valentine's Day With These Queer Animals

Episode Date: February 14, 2024

In a Valentine's Day exclusive report, NPR has learned there is currently a gay anteater couple at Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute in Washington D.C.But this couple is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg when it comes to queerness in the animal world – it's been documented in hundreds of species. We spoke with wildlife ecologist Christine Wilkinson of the "Queer is Natural" TikTok series to uncover the wildest, queerest animals of the bunch. Questions, comments or thoughts on queer animal love? Email us at [e-mail] and we might feature it on a future episode!See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hello, world. This is your host, Selena Simmons-Duffin, and I'm here with exclusive news just in time for Valentine's Day. You may have heard of gay penguins at the Central Park Zoo. The heartwarming story of how two male penguins parented a baby penguin became an award-winning and often banned children's book called Antango Makes 3. Well, at the National Zoo here in Washington, D.C.,

There is a new it couple. For more, we turn to shortwave producer Margaret Serino on the scene. Marge. Right now, I'm standing in the small mammal house at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., looking at an arboreal anteater named Cayenne. A few years ago, the zoo got Cayenne, paired her with another antedater named Nanny, and these two hit it off from the start. They were wrestling for days, cuddling, licking each other.

or, you know, showing all of these typical grooming breeding behaviors. But Kayan's weight was never changing. It seems like she was never getting pregnant. So they roped in a fertility specialist, and they pretty quickly figured out that the reason was because Kayan was a male and had testes instead of ovaries. This did not stop Manny and Kayan from spending hours or even days wrestling with each other. You know, sometimes it would look like,

Manny would be doing the mounting and then they would switch. So they're both bursts. And to this day, they have a little romance going on. Selena, back to you. Now we're going to bring in an expert. Christine Wilkinson, were you aware that there were gay antiters at the National Zoo? I had no idea that y'all had a same-sex couple of ant eaters at the zoo. That's amazing. I want to come visit.

Well, we would be happy to have you. So is it just gay penguins and gay anteaters at zoos? Is that the extent of gayness in the natural world? Oh my gosh, absolutely not. We have documented thousands of species that exhibit same-sex sexual behavior or some sort of sex change or other sorts of ways of breaking out of what we think of as the norm when we think about animal sexual behavior. And that's both in the wild and in captivity. What? That's amazing.

Okay, you have a doctorate in wildlife ecology, and you have been doing a TikTok series called Queer is Natural. How did you start doing this? To be honest, it was initially a clapback against my very homophobic family who, you know, for my whole life has been telling me how unnatural it is to be queer, when of course there's all of this scientific evidence out there that it is in fact a very natural way to be in nature all over the animal kingdom. from earthworms to bonobos and everything in between. Today on the show, banning books won't stop the truth. There is queerness all over the animal kingdom. We'll talk about an all-female lizard species that clones itself, how some deer are non-binary, and how clownfish switch genders.

I'm looking at you finding Nemo. You're listening to Shortwave, the Science Podcast from NPR. Okay, Christine, can you give us some examples? samples of what queerness looks like in nature? Oh, so many things. Okay, so there are a ton of animals that have both male and female genitalia. So have like this hermaphroditic nature. So things like banana slugs where they can inseminate each other.

Earthworms are the same. They're simultaneous hermaphrodites. They can inseminate each other's eggs at the same time. But if they can't find a mate, they can also undergo parthenogenesis, so where they just clone themselves, no sperm needed. There is also the New Mexico whiptail lizard. There are no males in that species. It is made up entirely of females.

So they reproduce through parthenogenesis. But these lizards are really special because they first produce twice the number of chromosomes, which then get recombined to form these genetically diverse offspring instead of just a straight clone. And another fun fact about them is that they still sometimes mount one another. and the lizard that's on the bottom in like the traditional female role, if you are in a hetero couple, ends up producing bigger eggs than the lizard that's on the top. So it's kind of like a benefit to the mounting in some cases. So there are tops and bottoms is what you're saying.

It seems like there is some evidence of tops and bottoms. Woo! I'll just get started with those. There's plenty more. The fun thing about studying this or kind of looking into this is that I think there's just a lot more that we don't even know about just because people haven't been looking for it. So we've established that queerness is everywhere, does being able to switch sex roles ever help an animal or group or species survive somehow? It definitely does.

Different fish species, clownfish, rasses, and others. They basically avoid conflict by having this ability to change sex once they get big enough. So the largest fish within their group is the female. and then the next largest fish is a male that's often the one mating with the female. And that basically allows them to avoid conflict over who's going to have access to the female, who's going to do this and that. So it's kind of like a queuing process where the biggest one is the female. And then the next biggest will become the next female when that female passes away. So, you know, finding Nemo was sort of inaccurate because Nemo's dad should have transformed into a female.

And do the clownfish need letters from their therapist before they can do that transition? They do not. Oh, okay. Interesting. Okay, so what about any examples of more than two sex roles? Are there any animals that kind of jump to your mind? In our mammal world, for deer, you have this sort of third gender that are called velvet horns. and these velvet horn deer are essentially, you know, a little bit hermaphroditic where they are males that they never shed the velvet on their horns. That's usually a thing that happens once you kind of come into maturity.

Their testicles never fully drop and they're sort of riding the line in between and they're not really able to mate or anything like that. But they have been shown to still act out paternal roles toward fawns. So kind of being able to help their population survive anyway by adopting fawns and being that extra resource for the group. Hmm. Okay. So in one of your videos, you covered a paper that came out on the evolution of same-sex sexual behavior in mammals. And we have seen that behavior in over 1,500 species. So what are researchers' best theories on why this behavior is observed in mammals specifically?

Yeah, so what that paper found is that the more, you know, social these animals were, or the more likely that they would need to kind of reduce conflict among their social groups, the more likely that they were to have evolved these same-sex sexual behaviors, both in males and in females. And so these same-sex sexual behaviors and pair bonding among the same sex is kind of thought to be another way of increasing those bonds and assuring that we can protect each other, we can take care of each other, we can help each other to forage.

So think about a thing like a bonobo, you know, one of our closest relatives, that's a primate species. They have so much sex. And it's thought to be like, hey, instead of fighting over these resources, let's just have sex with another, feel good about it, and share. And that's really worked out for them. I vote for that, you know, like share, have sex, don't fight. Seems like a good plan. Are there things when you're researching different species and different queer kind of ways of living that look familiar to humans.

Yeah, maybe this is a little spicy, but one of the reasons that Western science has, until semi-recently, largely written off same-sex sexual behavior is because people couldn't understand why it would be evolutionary beneficial. But what's interesting to me is that there are quite a lot of animals that seem to have sex for pleasure. And it doesn't need to necessarily be directly related to procreational. Things like dolphins and sometimes otters and flying foxes, oh my gosh, so much sex. There's quite a lot of sex for pleasure out there in the animal kingdom.

Hmm. I'm wondering, since you've been doing this for a while, how your audience responds to these videos. And like, if you hear back from people who are absorbing this information and kind of mulling it over and thinking about, okay, if there is this much queerness in nature, like, what does that mean for me? Yeah, so I think largely people have been really excited about it. I have had people reach out to me saying thank you for giving me like this tool to kind of show like my family or to show people in my workplace who like maybe don't understand just how common this is. And I have had very few naysayers on the comments, probably because I'm very intentional about putting in scientific evidence. Also, I think I'm very careful with my language because of this other aspect, which is, you know, while I said that I wanted to kind of show people, like, here is indisputable evidence about how widespread clearness is in nature, I also deeply feel that we should not have to do that in order to assure safety and equity and equal rights for queer folks and trans folks in human society. and it's even maybe a dangerous route. And so that's why I'm very careful about showing folks what's out there,

but not asking folks to justify our human rights using these scientific things that I'm saying. Christine Wilkinson, thank you so much for coming on for our Valentine's Day episode and telling us all about these beautiful queer relationships out in the natural world. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. Before we head out, a quick shout out to our shortwave plus listeners. We appreciate you, and we thank you for being a subscriber. Shortwave Plus helps support our show. And if you're a regular listener, we love for you to join so you can enjoy the show without sponsor interruptions.

Find out more at plus.npr.org slash shortwave. This episode was produced by Margaret Serino and edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. It was fact-checked by Britt Hansen. I'm Selena Simmons-Duffin. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.