— As Sphen, a gay penguin, dies, research shows same-sex sexual behaviour by animals is common and has evolutionary advantages
In the wild, when a penguin dies and its partner isn’t aware of what has happened, it will normally begin a long search for its mate. It was because of this that keepers at Sydney Sea Life Aquarium made the (heartbreaking) decision, on Thursday morning, following the death of 11-year-old gentoo penguin Sphen, to show his body to partner Magic, so he could understand “his partner wouldn’t actually be returning”. To prevent his fruitless hunt.
What they hadn’t bargained on was that when Magic was shown Sphen’s little lifeless body – on average, these penguins weigh about 12 pounds and are 30 inches tall – that he would be so overcome with emotion that he would begin singing. And that the rest of the penguin colony in the enclosure would join in.
“It was a very beautiful moment, the air was just filled with their singing,” said keeper Renee Howell, who has witnessed Magic and Sphen’s relationship develop since 2018. “It showed the impact [Sphen] had on his partner…we needed to do that in order for him to hopefully comprehend what had happened.”
Magic and Sphen first shot to fame six years ago: staff at the aquarium noticed an attraction between them when they saw them bowing to each other – a gentoo way of flirting.
Their romance went viral, and they were heralded as a “gay power couple” and symbol of equality. They adopted and raised two chicks: Lara in 2018 and Clancy in 2020, and fans around the world were enamoured with tales of them taking turns to sit on the egg to keep it warm and sharing parental duties.
But Magic and Sphen – who died from natural causes – are far from the only gay couple in the animal kingdom.
Chinstrap penguins Silo and Roy, of Central Park Zoo in New York, inspired the book And Tango Makes Three after they started a relationship in 1998; keepers observed them trying to perform a mating ritual with a rock, and so they then gave them an egg, resulting in the chick Tango.
On this side of the pond, at London zoo, in 2019, Humboldt penguins Ronnie and Reggie coupled up and the keepers put up a sign: “Some penguins are gay, get over it.” At DierenPark Amersfoort zoo in the Netherlands, a pair of male African penguins even stole an egg from a heterosexual couple, and again – a year later – from a lesbian couple.
Penguins have become the poster animals for gayness in animals, due to so many recorded examples – but same-sex behaviour is seen in many other species.
This month, it was reported that two flamingo dads, Hudson and Blaze, are successfully raising an abandoned chick after it was rejected by its biological parents at ZSL Whipsnade. And at Paignton Zoo in Devon, Curtis and Arthur, two Chilean flamingos, are also raising a chick together.
Same-sex sexual behaviour (and bisexuality) has been observed in more than 1,500 animal species, according to the scientific publication Nature, from insects to fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals.
But it hasn’t always been widely reported. In the past this behaviour was supposedly ignored because it contradicted Darwin’s theory of evolution as it involved non-reproductive behaviour – though other evidence suggests squeamishness and/or homophobia were involved.
After all, for centuries it was argued that human same-sex relations are “unnatural” and to contradict this would unravel our Noah’s-Ark-male-female-pairing we project on to other species.
In 1911, explorer George Murray Levick saw gay activity in a wild penguin colony at Cape Adare in Antarctica. In his notebooks he described the sex – but recorded it, concealed, in the Greek alphabet – and it was cut from official reports.
Later, in the 60s, Valerius Geist, a mammalogist, saw gay sex between his bighorn sheep but avoided publishing because it made him “cringe”. In 1913, when a colony of penguins at Edinburgh Zoo were found to be bisexual, the zoo director, TH Gillespie observed they “enjoy privileges not as yet permitted to civilized mankind.”
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