P-p-pick up a Penguin

Today’s Guardian carries a cheery little story about a German zoo’s attempts to get its penguins to breed. The problem is that the zoo recently discovered that three of their five penguin pairs are all male. So, do they have six gay penguins on their hands? Apparently, two of the all male pairs spent time last year sitting on a stone instead of an egg.

The zoo has imported four female penguins in an attempt to turn the males back to the straight and narrow, but so far with little success. German Gay and Lesbian groups have been up in arms about this naked attempt at heterosexual seduction, but I think they are over-reacting. The zoo’s spokeswoman is somewhat more pragmatic: "So far the males have scarcely thrown the females a single glance. The men have had the opportunity but haven’t done it. If the penguins really are gay then obviously they can stay gay."

It’s examples like this that really show up the ignorance of people who say "Being gay is unnatural". It’s been documented in over 450 species of animals besides our own. The research has been collected together into a book Biological Exuberance, by Bruce Bagemihl. It makes fascinating reading.

The "exuberance" of the title refers to the fact that sexuality has all sorts of forms in nature – matched only by the tireless efforts of thousands of researchers to document those forms. I was tickled by a recent entry in the Annals of Improbable Research titled: Egrets – I’ve had a few, which described N.G. McKilligan’s egret-filled research report “Promiscuity in the Cattle Egret (Bubulcus ibis)”, published in the journal The Auk, vol. 107, no. 2, April 1990, pp. 334-41.

Oh, and for those of you who don’t understand the "P-p-pick up a Penguin" title – it’s a reference to a long-running advert used in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s for a chocolate biscuit called a Penguin. This earworm is a very strong meme to most British people of my generation who were exposed to it.