Eat, drink, play, there is no enjoyment after death, says the Latin proverb. The dwarf chimpanzees have captured his spirit almost literally. They are the biggest eaters among animals, if we can judge them by human eyes, which we almost could, sharing 98% of their DNA with us. But pygmy chimpanzees are far from the only ones to surprise with their love life. Homosexual relationships are not ideal for the survival of the species, but they are no more rare than monogamous unions. But do they really exist, or do animal ideal marriages sometimes cheat and divorce?
The White-eyed Gibbon has long been believed by researchers to be a model of family life. The story begins when a teenage male sings. His voice determines whether or not he remains single, but he does his best. If he succeeds in getting married, his voice is soon joined by that of the underage female. Will they catch on?
They have to, because their future depends on their singing. In the forests of Burma, China, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, there is less and less space, so they have to make it and then defend it. For white-horned gibbons, informing neighbours who is welcome and who is not is simple: they mark their territory by singing.
And so they start practising. In the mornings, they practise relentlessly until their voices are completely clear and they can announce loudly to everyone around: we are unstoppable. It is true that intruders are usually repelled by the male, but if he is too weak because of illness or injury, the female will not even think twice before jumping on her opponent.
Then comes the sub-junior. White-faced gibbon females can become pregnant between 6 and 9 years old, but males mature more slowly and have no chance of becoming fathers before the age of 9. When they do, after seven months of pregnancy, the female takes a baby into her home. But they do not care for it. The mother takes care of the cub, but for the next 20 months she is more or less on her own.
The children grow up at home, and in their teenage years, like their father once did, they win over the female by singing. They move in together and live happily ever after.
For a long time, researchers believed that white-horned gibbons were really a model of animal monogamy, but it turns out they were a little too hasty. They only followed one pair, and usually not for long, so the pair got used to them, but the surrounding white-eyed gibbons didn’t, and they didn’t force themselves to get close. The “spouses” had no chance to cheat, even though they might have wanted to. The cards, which they had hidden up their sleeves, only came to light after they had been observed for a long time.
It then became clear that white-eyed gibbons are in fact very human-like: they want, they don’t want, they love and they cheat. Yes, they also abandon each other, although their family life, even when it is orderly, is quite strange. The researchers followed one family and stood a little in amazement. When a teenage male moved out of home, his two under-age brothers followed him to his new home, who knows why.
Then it got even more complicated. The father of the “young wife” disappeared and the “son-in-law” came to the “widow’s” rescue. This would have been very kind if he hadn’t been trying to sit on two chairs. He walked calmly from “wife” to “mother-in-law” and would have continued to do so if relations had not become so strained that he had to make a decision: do I stay or do I go? But he went, taking his two younger brothers with him. What happened to his “young wife” has not been established by researchers, but the “mother-in-law” certainly gave birth to a baby, probably the son of her “son-in-law”.
White-eyed gibbons also find their neighbours’ grass greener or their territory more attractive. It is not surprising, then, that males are quickly found who, even if tied, will immediately offer to “help” a female whose husband has died of disease or been killed. However, as a thief is only an opportunity, such deceptions and divorces are more frequent when several groups of white-horned gibbons live in a territory and have more opportunities to exchange.
Faithful partners
The myth of the loyalty of white-horned gibbons is therefore not true. What about the albatrosses that live on the Hawaiian islands of Laysan, Oahu or Kauai? Is the phrase “loyal to the grave” made for them, given that they are not only loyal but also have no problem with long-distance relationships?
The latter is certainly true. The male and female comb the skies above the sea, each to his own, but when the mating season comes, they return home. First, they get close again. They shake their heads and seduce each other before they have their young. When the female hatches an egg, she is not alone with it. The father warms it in the nest for the first three weeks so that she can fly away, find food and recover after she has been exhausted by laying the egg. For the next three weeks, she warms him, and then he warms her again, until the baby finally hatches.
Even then, Dad doesn’t turn her away. The parents raise the pups together until the mating period is over and they go their separate ways. But the following year they return, to their home and to their permanent partner. And so it goes, year after year, decade after decade.
Romantic? Very, except that it turned out not to be entirely real. When the researchers looked a little closer at the “spouses” who took turns hatching the egg, they got a shock: they were both female. The exception or the rule? On Oahu, 31% of couples are same-sex.
But why, when it is essential for the survival of the species that the partners have offspring? Sometimes you just have to adapt. On the islands of Oahu, Laysan and Kauai, there are simply not enough males. They are more likely to take the bait when foraging, so there is a higher mortality rate among them, and migration, which brings more females, also plays a role.
How do they then arrange for the females to hatch the egg after all? Simple: albatrosses are not as faithful as they seemed to be after all. When they all return to their island, the females of the same-sex pair each find their own “sperm donor”. Although there are far fewer males and they don’t have to bother with the females, the females from the same-sex couple are not happy with any of them. They don’t just turn to the first one in the next nest, but look for the one who is the most sexually potent, even if he is tied.
After observing them for a while, the researchers found that 10 of the 16 chicks were sired by a banded albatross, but never more than three. This meant that, on the one hand, he was spreading his genes, and on the other hand, he was only looking after one pup, the one he had with his wife.
His illegitimate child was taken care of by his mother. They hatched the eggs alternately, every three weeks. One egg? Yes. Yes, they each hatched their own, but when they took turns in the nest, they either buried one or threw it away.
And how did they decide which one would be the mother and which one would not? Apparently, the right to offspring goes to one for one year and to the other for the next. This puts them at a fundamental disadvantage compared to females in mixed partnerships, as they can only lay an egg every other year, but even then it will not necessarily hatch into a chick. Females in same-sex unions typically have 80 per cent fewer offspring than those in mixed unions, and motherhood is more dangerous for them.
In mixed-sex pairs, the egg is warmed by the male for the first three weeks, so the female can fly away and recover. In same-sex pairs, the egg is warmed by the mother for the first three weeks, so she is soon malnourished and much more susceptible to disease. If she wants a chick, she needs to be physically much stronger than her mixed-pair counterparts. With all these problems, why not wait for a single albatross? Because the risk of not finding one and being left childless is simply too high.
But these pairs are now solid and unchanging. Well, actually, they are not. It turns out that in each new mating season, some females leave their mates and find a mate, and some swap a mate for a mate. Among the latter, there were several that failed to fledge three times in a row. They were apparently not sexually compatible with their partners, but exchanged them for a mate and a random but more successful father.
Pleasure at the touch of a female
On Kauai, one same-sex couple was monitored for 19 years. Although the two female birds lived together nicely, female albatrosses are more or less forced into same-sex partnerships. What about macaque monkeys? Oh, they are a joy to behold. Well, maybe not the males. There are so many of them that they have to fight for a female during the mating season, not only among themselves but also with other females.
For a macaque monkey, sex with a female friend is much more pleasurable than sex with a male, but first she needs to have a few hours to herself. He climbs on top of the female and rubs his genitals against hers. Sometimes he hugs her, sometimes he sits on her as if he were riding her, but always he looks deep into her eyes. When they do not have sex, he never does.
That way they can enjoy the whole week. How much sex do they have in it? Several hundred, and the lovers stay close to each other even when they are not having sex. They defend their pleasure and each other fiercely against rivals.
And what do the males do in the meantime? They sit, watch and wait their turn. When the female decides she’s had enough and it’s time to conceive, she gets on top of the male and encourages him to give a little more of himself. His movements are different and her pleasure is less.
Make love, not war
That there are no greater hedonists than macaque monkeys? Far from the truth. The dwarf chimpanzees that live near Lake Timba in the Congo far outnumber them. Unlike their aggressive bigger brothers, chimpanzees live in highly harmonious communities. They have discovered an effective antidote to competition and aggression – sex.
“Chimpanzees get to sex through violence, while dwarf chimpanzees avoid violence through sex,” explained primatologist Frans de Waal. Thus, rape, murder, infanticide or inter-group fighting have never been observed among dwarf chimpanzees as they have in chimpanzees, as if they truly lived by the hippie principle: love each other, don’t make war.
But dwarf chimpanzees, which share 98% of their DNA with humans, are truly promiscuous. For them, sex is almost the same as human handshaking. They don’t need any special occasion for it: they use it to say good morning to each other, to welcome a new member of the group, to calm down when they’re sleeping together, to express their enthusiasm, to prove their social status …
They also wish each other a good run. In fact, nothing turns them on like food. They have an orgy before politely sharing it. But no, then they are not giving each other food for pleasure, but to release tension and not to argue about food later. How do they know who’s who if they’re all with everyone? They don’t really know, but there are times when mother and son and adult half-siblings are together.
But they don’t mind, just as sex is not taboo for them. Oral sex is familiar to them, polygamy is natural, and homosexuality is quite normal. The two males hang from the tree with their heads down and their faces turned towards each other. Then they rub each other with their penises in what primatologists call penis-swinging. When they’re done, it’s as if they’re greeting each other politely, and by swinging their penises, the males also avoid conflict and strengthen their bonds with each other.
Females rub together in a similar way, but usually before sharing food. But what does a female do if she is still hungry, even though she has already eaten her fill? The other female will just give her the food, the male will not. She will have to have sex with him first, not because she has to pay for the food with sex, but so that he will be less annoyed when he has to give it to her.
He will then give her his share of the meal, the one he got from the females, because they are responsible for sharing the food fairly. They are all subordinate to the oldest of them, who has given birth to the most sons. The dwarf chimpanzee group is headed by the alpha female, followed down the ladder by her younger friends, up to the teenage girls who have come to them from other groups.
Initially, teenage females try hard to please the alpha female and to bond with other females. Dwarf chimpanzees have found that style is power: even if they are 20% smaller than the males, they are stronger than them in terms of bonding. If a male dares to harass a female, it’s not the female who takes him on, it’s all the females in the group. And because they are so close-knit, males have to behave nicely, and they also have to court older females if they want to climb the social ladder, of course. Only those who have been approved by the alpha female can become an alpha male.
But there are no social differences between orgies. Everyone participates in them, females, males, the elderly and teenagers. Yes, even they associate themselves with sex. And although they supposedly develop mutual feelings, they know no jealousy. When it comes to sex, they are completely alien to possessiveness, and surprisingly, they are familiar with romance: they kiss, hold hands and sometimes feet, grope each other and look into each other’s eyes during the sexual act.
Sex to release stress and tension is important to them, so that females have sex even when they are not in the fertile period.
Making love to the ocean
Who likes sex for the sake of it, without offspring as a result? The four smartest mammals: humans, apes, dwarf chimpanzees and dolphins. Yes, even dolphins have some unexpected sexual habits. One of the more surprising is masturbation. Since they don’t have hands and need help, they make sure a live eel winds itself around their penis.
In their youth, they also like to experiment with same-sex love. They get involved with it in such a way that their youthful friends later help them chase off the females. At that time, they work in groups. When they are waiting for a female to be ready to have sex, they swim close to her so that she cannot escape and, above all, so that rivals from another group cannot get to her.
Sometimes they even get into fights with them and casually have sex. Bisexual dolphins also use sex to be aggressive and show dominance, but the sex does not last long. It is said to end after 10 seconds, but it is true that they can repeat it several times within an hour.
But it’s not just dolphins that are attracted to dolphins, people are too. Seven percent of sodomists – people who want to have sex with animals – would prefer to have a dolphin as a sexual partner. In theory, female sodomists have a better chance of success. One study found that women emit similar pheromones to dolphins, so dolphins are easily attracted to them.
Margaret Howe Lovat certainly had no problem with hers. In the 1960s, during a NASA-funded experiment, she learned first-hand how dolphins have sex. “He rubbed against my knee, leg or arm and I let him. It wasn’t uncomfortable, as long as it wasn’t too rough. It was easier to just go for it and let it happen,” she explained why she did not back down.
But slowly, oral sex became routine. “It was part of everything that was happening, like an itch, just to get rid of it and move on.” Then she realised that the easiest way to get a dolphin to do what she wanted was to “release” it herself. “It was sexual on his part, but not on mine – sensual maybe,” she said, describing what it was like when her hand replaced the live eel wrapped around his penis in the ocean.
When the writer Malcom Brenner heard her story, he decided to speak out himself, only he is a fellow murderer. In 1971, at the age of 18, he reportedly had a six-month affair with Dolly the dolphin. As a freelance photographer, he took pictures of dolphins at a new theme park in Florida, and was allowed to stay after the others had left. Then all he and Dolly had to do was escape the dolphin.
They both reportedly agreed to the relationship, and after three months of friendship, she reportedly encouraged it. “At first I tried to reject her, I wasn’t interested in her, but after a while I thought: if this was a woman, would I bother with all this rationalising and making excuses?” He had his first sexual intercourse with an animal when he was 11 or 12 years old, but felt dirty after interacting with a pet poodle. With Dolly, he didn’t anymore.
At first, it was reportedly quite rough, but then it became more and more delicate. “I felt like I was making love to the ocean itself. My feeling, the most important feeling, was that I had forgiven myself because I had got over my hesitation and given her what she wanted.”
Then, apparently, the energy flowed between them. It was getting stronger. “The dolphin I knew was also aware of this. She had to escape the dolphin to get to me.” Although he married twice, he reportedly never had another moment as intimate as the one with Dolly, because making love to a dolphin is said to be “transcedental”.
Sexual intercourse began with him rubbing her back. “When I rubbed her like that and lowered my hand towards her tail, Dolly slowly rotated around her elongated axis.” But their romance was short-lived. The theme park was closed and nine months after they met, Dolly was transported to Mississippi. Nine months later, she died there.
The news of her death broke Malcom Brenner’s heart. For the next five years, he was reportedly depressed, convinced that Dolly had committed suicide and had deliberately stopped breathing. He and Dolly were in a relationship, he claims to this day, and he therefore sees nothing wrong or objectionable in what he did. He certainly did not break any law at the time.
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Till death do us part
But there is nothing bad about the love life of crow vultures, who spend most of their time looking for carrion. They are not only faithful “spouses”, but also caring parents. Between January and July, the female hatches one egg, always in the same place, and then they both look after the offspring. They feed it carefully, for up to eight months if necessary, while the baby attaches itself to them so that the bond between them remains intact even when it grows up.
When the offspring of 16 families of sparrowhawks were tested, all the chicks were the genetic children of their parents. No secret cheating, even if the pairs spent day after day, year after year together. Are sparrowhawks really that committed to each other? Perhaps not, say the researchers, but their lives are so intertwined that they simply can’t afford to jump over the fence.
The prairie vole would never dream of such a thing. The female with whom he loses his virginity must become the mother of his children and stay that way. He is an attentive lover and a caring father who never neglects his family duties.
Yet he is almost fanatical in his determination about who he will mate with. He does not even conquer other females. What’s more, he even attacks them. Why? Supposedly because of some neurotransmitters in his brain, which probably also make him completely impervious to foreign charms. Only 10% of prairie voles that have been seduced by virgin females have succumbed to temptation. Their commitment to the one and only knows almost no bounds. After the death of a mate, fewer than 20 percent of vultures find a new mate.
Canadian cranes, around 1.20 metres tall, are not as consistent, but they are certainly loyal. And attentive. Even when couples stay together for years, they court each other again and again. The lovers “dance” to a precise choreography. In fact, they have five of them, but three of them are used exclusively when they are about to have offspring.
The dance helps them to reconcile, and once the egg is rolled, it takes them both almost a month to roll it. They also look after the chick, which is all furry and wide-eyed at birth. Although it can leave the nest as early as 24 hours later, the parents feed the chick alone for the first three weeks, and come to its rescue whenever it cannot find its own food until the ninth or tenth month.
When he leaves them, usually a month or two before they start hatching a new egg, he finds company with other teenagers and flies away, leaving them together on their journey towards death. And what happens if one of them does die? The surviving partner finds a new life companion.
But the exceptions trump the rule. Even among Canadian cranes. Some get divorced and start over, and researchers have found two adulterers among them. Although they had been in a relationship for 12 years, the crane found a different father for her pup, but of course her husband raised him, and one pup had the wrong mother to care for him.
Wife, mother, grandmother
Even with grey wolves, things can get complicated, although it is true that they are basically loyal, long-standing companions who spend most of their time together. The female chooses the husband, but she has to dig the den in which her pups will be born. Around six are usually born and for the first three weeks she never lets them out of her sight.
So your dad takes care of the food? Not really. Grey wolves live in packs, but usually only one pair breeds at a time, so all members of the pack bring food for the pups. In fact, they eat it and then spit it out. For the first 45 days, it’s the only thing on the pups’ menu, and then they get a taste of meat until they’re eight to ten weeks old enough to go out and start learning wolf life.
At first glance, wolves seem to live a sheltered life, and researchers say so too. For 20 years, they have been watching 90 pairs and their 174 pups. Only four of them were “controversial”. In two of them, the father was a first-degree relative. One had two fathers, a married man and a lone wolf that the wolf had met on one of her forays. In the fourth case, the husband cheated by impregnating his wife at home and, in the neighbouring pack, a female wolf who became a widow after a car accident. But the deception was unique. The widow found a new partner the following year and the cheating husband stayed with his wife.
If wolves live in packs, where do lone wolves come from? The sexually immature prefer to go their own way rather than be with siblings, and so do the elderly who are infertile. This doesn’t mean they don’t have sex, of course, because over time they too form packs. There are almost as many females as males, and when there are only two in a pack, it’s usually a pair.
And they are not brother and sister. Wolves avoid incest in principle, but between four and seven per cent of wolves do. Researchers have observed a pack in which the alpha male has died. Since the pack is led by an alpha male and an alpha female, they needed a new male. Normally, the second most powerful wolf in the pack should have succeeded him, but he did not. The father’s throne was taken by his son. This would be perfectly normal if we were talking about a kingdom, but in a wolf pack, the son suddenly became the mother’s husband. He conceived children with his mother, but then, like his father before him, he disappeared. His son succeeded him. He conceived children with his mother, who was also his grandmother, and had sex with his sister.
Until you find the right one
There are no such excesses in Spotted Owls. They are loyal and prolific. A pair can have as many as two broods a year, or 12 young, or as many as 22.But what happens if there are no broods? Love, up or down, the species must survive.
If the harvest of children is poor, each partner has the right to find a new partner. When the researchers looked more closely at 634 couples, they found that 23.5% of them ended up in divorce. In the divorce, the male tried to keep the property, i.e. his place in the barn, while the female had to leave.
Most decided to divorce after the first futile year of parenthood, but only one couple tried for six years before giving up. The researchers did not report how old the couple were, but the older the couple, the less likely they were to split up. Not because they are older and wiser, but because finding a new partner takes time, and time is slowly running out.
Since there is no cheating, divorce is the only option for the offspring. No one knows who initiates it, but in any case, time pressures mean that young people are more likely to divorce. When a male is looking for his first wife, he always pays attention to the fact that he has many black spots on him and that they are larger. When looking for a second wife, he is not so picky. He does not divorce to find a younger and prettier one, but to have offspring. So he always ends up with the worse one, while the females do not lower their standards even when the water is already running down their throats.
New couples tend to have more children, but more children survive in families where the parents have been together for a long time. So it seems that spotted owls are working to a plan: divorce until you find a sexually compatible partner, and once you do, don’t let them go.
The romantic image of illusions
Beautiful, but not romantic, like the romantic image of swans forming a heart shape while courting with their heads bowed. One of the most famous images from the animal world with an almost equally familiar message: till death do us part. But swans are loyal.
It’s a good thing the photos don’t show how loud the swans are. “Singing” belongs to courtship. Although three of the six subspecies are a bit more gentle, the North American swan makes up for all three by screaming during courtship.
After the engagement comes the wedding. Well, actually, courtship is marriage. From then on, the swans are an inseparable couple, but they spend their lives together not because it is nice to be together, but because it is useful. It is not so easy to bring puppies to bread, so they have to learn parenthood. The longer they are together, the more they know and the more in tune they are, so the more likely their swans are to survive.
But they are together not only to be the best parents they can be, but also for safety reasons. They are each much more vulnerable to attackers, and the swan even has an eating disorder when her husband is not around. Apparently she does not like food, and if she has to eat it alone, then she eats less.
The little swan has no chance of a life other than a monogamous one. It migrates from northern Russia to Europe in winter and has to fly 2500 kilometres there and then back. He simply does not have time to find a new mate on the way, so he chooses one during the mating season in Russia, flies with her and stays with her. Cheating may be on his mind, but the opportunities for it are few. No wonder, then, that researchers who have followed 10,000 little swans for 50 years have found only three divorcees among them.
But why do swans separate at all? Not because they are tempted by foreign charms, but because of insurmountable differences. If the couple fails for one season and is left without offspring, they can divorce, because it will be at least another season or two before they have a new success. The new couple may have fewer children in the first season, but in the following years they have more and more. Yet only a small number of swans divorce, say 4% in Poland.
But if they are divorcing, they are probably cheating? Yes, they do, although the Australian Black Swan is the most susceptible to jumping the fence. She is constantly unfaithful. Every season, a black swan lays at least one, if not seven, eggs that it has not fertilised. The Black Swan is simply afraid that her husband will fail and she will be left childless, and she asks a neighbour for help just in case.
The other five species are loyal. The fathers are diligent in hatching the eggs so that the mothers can eat and regain the fat they lost when they laid the eggs. Black swans spend even more time in the nest than their cheating wives, but with good reason: the more time a black swan spends in the nest, the later she is ready to lay another egg. For the new swans, it is already worth a little patience and a little shut-eye.
