With this behaviour seen across species from birds and insects to reptiles and mammals - including humans - researchers are trying to understand why. On October 19, 2018, Baby Sphengic was born. After the two penguins bonded and began creating a nest, zookeepers at the Sea Life Sydney Aquarium decided to give them an egg that had been abandoned by a pair of heterosexual penguins in the group. Gentoos are closely related to Adélie penguins, the species Levick first observed in 1911. Case study: Gentoo penguins Sphen and Magic, two male Gentoo penguins, recently made headlines when they 'adopted' an egg. Researchers are now going beyond just observing it though, with researchers at Imperial leading the way in unravelling how, and why, homosexuality is found across nature. Homosexuality is widespread, with bisexuality even more prevalent across species. Same-sex behaviour ranging from co-parenting to sex has been observed in over 1,000 species with likely many more as researchers begin to look for the behaviour explicitly. More than 200 years later, research has moved past some of the taboos those early researchers faced and shown that homosexuality is much more common than previously thought. The last remaining copy was recently unearthed providing valuable insights into animal homosexuality research.īut forays into animal homosexuality research long predate Levick, with observations published as far back as the 1700s and 1800s. Concerned by the graphic content, he only printed 100 copies of Sexual Habits of the Adélie Penguin to circulate privately. However, none of these notes would appear in Levick's published papers. In his notebooks, he described their sexual behaviour, including sex between male birds. He chronicled the animals' daily activities in great detail. Among them was George Murray Levick, a zoologist and photographer who would be the first researcher to study the world's largest Adélie penguin colony. In 1910, a team of scientists set off on the Terra Nova Expedition to explore Antarctica. Read this article in our new Imperial Stories immersive digital storytelling platform!
Imperial researchers are using a new approach to understand why same-sex behaviour is so common across the animal kingdom.
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