Nature is Gay
Pride Month is over, but that doesn't mean we have to stop celebrating all of the wonderful and weird ways in which nature is queer. As promised in our bonus episode (available on Patreon here) titled "Nature is Gay", this blog post will be showcasing more queer animals that we didn't get a chance to touch on. And if you haven't yet, please take a moment to rate Queer Planet on IMDB, where a bunch of homophobes have negatively reviewed the documentary in an attempt to continue to suppress acknowledging that queerness is natural.
Bonobos
Alright, it's about time we take a deeper dive into the world of Bonobos, because we mention them so much. Bonobos (Pan paniscus), like chimpanzees, share over 98% of their DNA with us. They look similar to chimps, but are smaller, darker, and leaner. In terms of how they run their societies, they are different from chimps; Although they also have fission-fusion groups made up of males and females, and like chimps females will leave their family group to find a new one around 6-13 years old, but their societies are more matriarchal. This means that males will gain status given who their mother is, and they remain close throughout their lives, to the point that sometimes mother Bonobos may interrupt mating between two individuals if she wants her son to mate with that female.
And as we've talked about, they settle conflict by having sex. And by that, we mean they do it in every way you can imagine (penetrative, oral, rubbing, you name it), with every possibly combination of partners, and sometimes multiple partners (multiple males and females) at the same time. Females will rub their genitals together, an activity that occurs every two hours, on average. Males will also mount one another and rub their erections together, but will also do a fun little activity termed penis fencing, where the males will hang from opposite branches, face on another then, well, you get the gist. Similar to us, bonobos don't have a set breeding season, and with the rate at which they have sex, it's clear they're doing it for more than reproductive purposes. They use sex to settle conflict, yes, but they also engage in sexual activities even just to say hello. They're also the only other creature we know of besides ourselves that engage in tongue-to-tongue kissing. They also engage in face-to-face sex, something nearly unheard of in the natural word besides in humans. When they come upon a new food source, they'll often all get excited which results in an orgy...If you watch the documentary Queer Planet, there is minutes of footage of all of this (watch at your own risk - it's a lot).
Although on the podcast we have called Bonobos the "hippies of the apes" due to their propensity to have sex rather than fight, a study published April of this year titled Differences in expression of male aggression between wild bonobos and chimpanzees found that actually, Bonobos are more aggressive than we think; Due to the habitat they live in and how war-torn the area is, studying Bonobos has been slow going compared to other apes, but this study found that Bonobos actually do exhibit aggression towards one another, but the antagonistic interactions are often females to males, which is different from patriarchal chimp societies where males initiate most antagonistic reactions. The study also found that male chimps form more coalitions, whereas male Bonobos sometimes are more aggressive to one another than male chimps, and they are less likely to form male coalitions. The difference though is, male Bonobos will often attack other male Bonobos, but chimps will group up and attack an individual together. In Bonobo society, because females are more dominant, males don't need to worry about forming alliances with other males for power, and researchers found that more aggressive males were given more opportunities for mating. But at the end of the day, despite male Bonobos showing all this aggression, the biggest difference is chimpanzees murder one another, and Bonobos don't.
Despite all of this sex, they are still endangered; Bonobos are only found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the most immediate threat to them is poaching. Even in protected areas, there are commercial poachers aided by military groups and local administrations. Females sexually mature around 12 years old and can give birth shortly after, however they care for their infants for 5 years, so they cannot reproduce quickly enough to compensate for their population losses.
Northern Jacanas
Now, let's move away from matriarchal primates to another fascinating animal - the Northern Jacana (Jacana spinosa). The Northern Jacana is a wetland bird, as you may have been able to deduce from their wonky legs and feet. These birds range from Mexico to Panama, and are rare sightings in the southern U.S. Male jaanas are half the size of females, which isn't all that uncommon in birds - female raptors/birds of prey are larger than males as well. But what makes Northern Jacanas so special is that they are polyandrous - meaning that females mate with multiple males. The females are also the ones that defend territories, and do so with spikes on the tips of their wings and on their feet. Within their territory, they have multiple males within a harem, and will even go to neighboring territories to stomp out rival female eggs and will steal her males. Because the females are so busy fighting and defending their territories, the males are the ones to raise young (and the young are ADORABLE).
These birds are capable of breeding year round, but usually do so at the beginning of the rainy season. The female will mate with all the males on a platform that he builds, which then becomes the nest that she deposits eggs onto. Males sit on the eggs, and females only visits their eggs occasionally. She can lay eggs every 9 days, and the eggs hatch after 28 days. After hatching, in 24 hours, the babies leave the nest and follow the male around for 8 weeks. But because the female is breeding with multiple males, each male may be raising young that doesn't even belong to him. We love a lady in charge.
Common Side-Blotched Lizards
Alright, let's end with one of the least common mating systems on the planet - the Common Side-Blotched Lizard (Uta stansburinia). They are some of the most common lizards in western North America, with a suspected population size in the millions. They breed from April to May each year, and lay eggs from April to August.
These lizards are so uncommon in the sense that there are 5 'genders' so to speak - 3 males (orange, blue and yellow) and 2 females. These different 'genders' come with different colors and different physical differences like different egg sizes or penis shapes. Biologist Barry Sinervo from the University of California, Santa Cruz, discovered their unique reproductive system, termed the 'rock-paper-scissors' system. Let's get into it.
Each differently colored male has a different reproductive strategy. Orange-throated males have high testosterone and are 'very dominant', and will maintain a territory that contains multiple females. Yellow stripe-throated males are considered 'sneaker' males (like we talked about with cuttlefish), and do not have their own territory but will live on the fringes of orange-throated male territories to mate with their females while the male is surveying his large territory. Blue-throated males will stay with one female and defend her, so they're able to keep yellow stripe-throated males away, but they cannot withstand being attacked by an orange-throated male. So, orange beats blue, blue beats yellow, and yellow beats orange...Rock, paper, scissors! But there have even been instances where yellow stripe-throated males, following the death of a nearby dominant male, they will transform into a blue male (while being genetically distinct from blue males).
And then there are orange-throated females who, like their male counterparts are very territorial and lay a lot of small eggs. Finally, there are yellow-throated females who lay fewer but larger eggs, and are much more tolerant of one another. This mating system allows these lizards to adapt populations very quickly to environmental changes or increased predation.
These are only a few more examples of animals that bend hetero-cis-gendered ‘norms’, but there are so many more wonderful examples. If you haven’t yet, check out our bonus episode about it all, and join our Patreon for free for access to an audio version of this blog post!
