Gay Penguins in Germany Rear Their Own Chick

Z and Vielpunkt are part of a "gay community" of six penguins at a zoo in Bremerhaven in northern Germany, the Daily Telegraph reports. The abandoned egg was an "Easter present" for the pair, the zoo said in a statement.

The zoo's gay penguins are of the endangered Humboldt species and were in the news in 2005 when Swedish female penguins were introduced "in an unsuccessful, and controversial, attempt to 'cure' them" of their sexual preference, the Telegraph adds.

"Three pairs of male penguins had been seen attempting to mate with each other and trying to hatch offspring from stones," the Telegraph reports, a phenomenon that has been observed in other gay penguin couples.

A penguin couple at Polar Land, a zoo in Harbin, northern China, were separated from the zoo's other penguins by a picket fence until animal rights protesters called for their return to the main penguin dwelling, the Daily Mail reported in December 2008.

The couple had been stealing eggs from heterosexual penguin couples and replacing them with stones. Zookeepers explained that discrimination was not the reason for removing the penguins. Rather, it was meant “so as not to disturb the colony during hatching time,” the Daily Mail reported.

But after the urging of zoo visitors, the gay couple was given the eggs of an “inexperienced young mother." 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,” according to the Daily Mail.

Silo and Roy, who have since broken up, were a well-known gay penguin couple at New York City’s Central Park Zoo. The couple 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.”

Wendell and Cass of the New York Aquarium in Coney Island were a happy couple, undisturbed by females, until Cass passed away. A 2002 Salon magazine interview with their keeper, Stephanie Mitchell, revealed more about one of the world’s first out gay penguin couples.

“Any biologist will tell you that the purpose in getting together is to create young," Mitchell told Salon. "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.

Many species of animals have been known to display homosexual behavior, not just penguins, LiveScience reported in 2006. "Homosexuality has been observed in more than 1,500 species, and the phenomenon has been well described for 500 of them,” according to Petter Bockman, the exhibit coordinator of the University of Olso's 2006 exhibit, "Against Nature?"

Many of those who study the phenomenon see animal homosexuality as fascinating and say it 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, LiveScience adds. But some animal researchers deem homosexuality in the animal kingdom to be unimportant.

Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell’s “And Tango Makes Three” (Simon & Schuster, 2005), a children's book about a baby penguin with two dads, 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 noted in 2008. According to the blog, other books on the challenged list include Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”