Gay Penguin Egg-Snatchers Get Their Own Brood

The penguin couple, who live at a zoo called Polar Land in Harbin, northern China, were sequestered from the other penguins by a picket fence until animal rights protesters called for their return to the main penguin dwelling, the Daily Mail reports.

The couple had been taking eggs from heterosexual penguin couples and replacing them with stones.

The zookeepers explained that the penguins were removed last month not because of discrimination but “so as not to disturb the colony during hatching time.”

After urging from zoo visitors, they have now been given the eggs of an “inexperienced young mother” and the zoo has said it may try artificial insemination in the future to give the pair a chance to raise their own young, since “despite being gay the three-year-old male birds are still driven by an urge to be fathers.”

Silo and Roy, a well-known gay penguin couple at New York City’s Central Park Zoo, also attempted to “incubate a rock” before being given their own egg, which they “successfully hatched and raised,” according to FOX News, which reported on the pair’s breakup in 2005. After their successful go at parenting, Silo took up with a female penguin, leaving Roy to sit “disconsolately at the edge of the penguin area, staring at the wall.”

Another gay penguin pair, Wendell and Cass, of the New York Aquarium in Coney Island, were a happy couple, undisturbed by females, until Cass passed away. A 2002 interview with their keeper, Stephanie Mitchell, in Salon, revealed more about one of the world’s first out gay penguin couples. Mitchell explained, “Any biologist will tell you that the purpose in getting together is to create young. But I don’t know why [the female penguins] aren’t interested in Wendell or Cass.” Mitchell added that sex between the male penguins is exactly the same process as between a male and female penguin, just without the eggs.

Penguins are just one of many species of animals known to display homosexual behavior. As LiveScience reported in 2006, an exhibit at the University of Oslo’s Natural History Museum, “Against Nature?” explored the fact that “[h]omosexuality has been observed in more than 1,500 species, and the phenomenon has been well-described for 500 of them,” according to exhibit coordinator Peter Bockman.

While some animal researchers dismiss homosexuality in the animal kingdom as unimportant, others see it as a fascinating phenomenon that can be explained by several factors, including group psychology, sexual pleasure and the idea that sexual orientation doesn’t exist in the animal kingdom at all.

Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell’s “And Tango Makes Three” (Simon & Schuster, 2005) is a children’s book about a baby penguin with two dads that made the American Library Association’s “challenged” list, meaning there “has been a formal written request that ‘materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.’” The Los Angeles Times blog Jacket Copy notes that other books on the “challenge” list include Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”