— A new paper suggests same-sex activity may help mammals’ social relationships
Same-sex sexual activity pervades the animal kingdom — it’s been observed in at least 1,500 animal species, from crickets to seagulls to penguins — but it’s still not well understood.
A new paper suggests one explanation: Same-sex sexual activity may help mammals establish and maintain social relationships and even mitigate conflict.
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday, adds to the growing body of knowledge about animal sexuality.
Scientists had long viewed same-sex sexual activity as an evolutionary paradox: It costs animals precious time they could be spending seeking out sexual partners of the opposite sex, with which they could reproduce.
Some have explained same-sex sexual behavior as non-adaptive — meaning it doesn’t help an organism survive, but it doesn’t harm reproductive success either. Others see it as a continuation of our simplest ancestors’ indiscriminate sexual activity, part of the norm, rather than an anomaly.
The new study, conducted by researchers at the Spanish National Research Council and the University of Granada, suggests this behavior has evolved multiple times in mammals and may not be related to those ancient non-discriminate mating behaviors. On the contrary, their analysis found an association between same-sex sexual behavior in mammals and getting along.
Sex as conflict resolution
The researchers did not study animals in the wild. Instead, José María Gómez, a professor of ecology at the University of Granada, and his colleagues compiled a database of existing information on same-sex sexual behavior, and reconstructed species trees to investigate whether there were any links between same-sex sexual behavior in mammals and social behavior.
They found same-sex sexual behavior seems to occur more often in social animals, like primates, which need to form communities to survive and reproduce. That behavior could have evolved to facilitate social cohesion and diminish intrasexual aggression and conflict, the researchers argue.
“Rather than a maladaptive or aberrant behavior, same-sex sexual behavior in nonhuman mammals is a convergent adaptation facilitating the maintenance of social relationships,” Gómez told The Washington Post in an email.
The study’s findings echo what others have found in their research.
“In socially tense situations, sexual behavior between same-sex partners seems to function to mitigate that tension,” said Christine Webb, a primatologist at Harvard University who did not participate in the study.
She said Gómez’s research helps to widen the scope of what it means for a behavior to be “adaptive.” “This general question of evolutionary function — that behavior must aid in survival and reproduction — what this paper is arguing is that reaffirming social bonds, resolving conflicts, managing social tensions, to the extent that same-sex sexual behavior preserves those functions — it’s also adaptive.”
Webb said if you think about the many reasons humans might have sex — it makes sense that animals would use sex in many ways, too.
“We know that humans have a huge variety of reasons for having sex, only one of which is procreation,” said Eliot Schrefer, author of the book “Queer Ducks (and Other Animals): The Natural World of Animal Sexuality.” “So of course animals are reaping the benefits that humans do from it.”
He cites male garter snakes using pheromones to attract other males when it’s cold, causing other males in the area to come form a “mating ball” — which can help them all survive through the night.
Sex and dinner
Sex can also provide animals with a way of easing conflict, or can act as foreplay for sharing food, said Christine Wilkinson, a conservation scientist based at the University of California at Berkeley and the California Academy of Sciences who was not involved in the paper.
“You have African lion males that travel together and help each other to survive,” she said. “They’re also mounting each other and sort of bonding in more physical ways because they need each other.”
Jon Richardson, a behavioral ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Minnesota, researches same-sex sexual behavior in insects. He said that often we’re looking for a one-size-fits-all explanation for this behavior in nature. In his research on crickets, he’s found that they have a fairly broad filter for engaging in mating behavior.
“They don’t care too much whether it’s male or female or if it’s the right developmental stage or not. If it looks kind of like a cricket, if it moves like a cricket, you might as well try singing towards it to see what happens,” Richardson said.
>He also cautions against extrapolating too much about humans from this research on animals. The fact that this new paper is about mammals may mean it can tell us something about our evolution, but same-sex sexual behavior in animals isn’t the same as human homosexuality — for the most part animals don’t seem to exhibit a permanent same-sex preference but more of a sexual flexibility.
Still, it might be inevitable that people will make those connections, said Schrefer, and that isn’t always a bad thing.
“Every time one of these articles comes out, a bunch of people don’t feel unnatural anymore,” he said.
Complete Article ↪HERE↩!