SciShow Tangents - Gay Animals with Field Guide to Gay Animals

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

It wouldn't be Pride at Tangents if we weren't getting into some science! We're joined by Owen Ever and Laine Kaplan-Levenson, the hosts of a new show from news outlet Canadaland called "Field Guide to Gay Animals." Our conversation ranged far and wide across a myriad of ways queerness is expressed in the animal world and the challenges and joys of studying it. SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! Head to www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter! A big thank you to Patreon subscriber Garth Riley for helping to make the show possible!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy some great Tangents merch!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreenSources:[Truth or Fail Express]Sequentially hermaphroditic shrimphttps://sites.lsa.umich.edu/eeblog/2020/12/01/sequential-hermaphroditism-or-why-to-be-wary-of-frog-dna/https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/oceans-rising-acidity-could-impact-shrimps-early-sex-reversal-180972521/https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0218238https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355179232_Protandric_Transcriptomes_to_Uncover_Parts_of_the_Crustacean_Sex-Differentiation_PuzzleNudibranch with male and female sex organshttps://www.livescience.com/27065-sea-slug-uses-disposable-penis.htmlhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3639767/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10164-018-0562-z?wtSparrows with white or tan stripes and functionally four gendershttps://www.audubon.org/news/the-fascinating-and-complicated-sex-lives-white-throated-sparrowshttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7725849/[This or That: Bird or Bug?]Male-male duo that dances together to attract a mate (blue-backed manakin)https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/51171525#page/225/mode/1uphttps://academic.oup.com/beheco/article/18/1/21/209396Male-male pair that takes over a male-female pair’s nest (Japanese termites)https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/680968https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003347216301233Mating-related injuries on both male and female specimens (dragonflies)https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/16252041#page/48/mode/1up[Ask the Science Couch]History of sexual diversity in animals documented or not in zoology (e.g. Adelie penguins)https://academic.oup.com/zoolinnean/article/195/1/1/6568055https://www.penguinscience.com/reprints/10%20Russell.pdfhttp://www.italian-journal-of-mammalogy.it/pdf-77304-13455?filename=Same_sex%20sexual%20behaviour.pdf[Butt One More Thing]Aristotle’s History of Animals mentions female pigeons laying wind-eggs after same-sex sexual behaviorhttps://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/history_anim.6.vi.htmlhttps://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/found-an-egg-with-no-yolk

Hello everyone and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host Hank Green. And joining this week, as always, representing Team Tangents, we have our science expert Sari Reilly. Hello. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. What up?

But weirdly, entering the ring, we have the hosts of a new podcast from the independent news company, Canada Land, Field Guide to Gay Animals, the show that explores sexuality, gender, and joy in the animal world. Cheeky and contemplative, curious and raunchy, Field Guide shows you the natural world more exuberant, more joyful, and more gay than you could possibly imagine. And on team Field Guide to Gay Animals, we've got oh whatever. Hello everyone. And we've got Layne Kaplan Levinson.

Hi. So I. Just want to know when I this is my this is my kickoff question, and it's unrelated, but I've been curious. I wanted to hear from these guys. Just tell me a time you were pooped on. OK, well, 2020. Okay, well, 2020. I had to do a quick scan to be like, what can I say that is nearly appropriate for this? I definitely pooped on my own self some more than once.

I have ulcerative colitis, but I'm not counting self poops. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so not counting self poops, trying to stay within the realm of animals. It was 2020, carnival, I live in New Orleans, carnival had been canceled. And I was walking down the street, admiring the streetcar. It was like very cliche. And there was a barren tree full of Mardi Gras beads, which happens. And I was just looking up at it, wistfully, like longingly, yearning like I do. And then all of a sudden I got shot all over by a flock of cedar wax wings. Oh, that's so, they're so beautiful.

It's so beautiful. And then I fell in love with them. And their poop is bright purple because of their propensity to eat berries and get drunk. And so I realized our revelry may have been tampered that year, but the animals were still doing it. They were having a great time. Absolutely. It was beautiful. An even better time, perhaps.

Perhaps. Well, they were like pooping on humans. You thought they were Mardi Gras beets. Maybe it was just a bunch of poop up there. Might have been. So did multiple birds poop on you at once? Yeah, yeah. I don't know if they time did or maybe because they had all eaten together.

So they had synced up. But it was just like you scared them. Did you scare them? I like to think that I have like a very calming presence. So maybe I didn't scare them, but I might have excited them in some way. Maybe they were like, oh, Owen is here. I know. I know what it is.

They unclenched their cloacas. Exactly. They're like, do we have a gay birder, ladies and gentlemen? It's a sign of respect. It's just like a reframing in our mind we have to do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lane, do you have, have you been pooped on? Well, I mean, I will say, no, we were kind of, you know, potentially straying from humans.

This is, this is hybrid. I guess it is human, but mine is tiny human. It was a Minotaur?, but mine is tiny human. Hey, was it Minotaur? Well, mine's tiny human. I have been pooped on most recently by babies. Not my own, but little nibblings and friends' babies. It has happened more than once in the past year, I'd say.

I think that the terminology is called a blowout, they say. Oh, great. Which is really evocative. Sometimes I have those as a grownup, and I'm like, boy, if I had a diaper on right now, this would have been a problem. Yeah, the diaper does not contain the blowout. The parents have things to deal with the baby, you know, a change of clothes for the baby, but they don't have things to like help you.

No change of clothes for the guest? Exactly. And you're like, well, now I have to go home. And now I have to deal with this. No, what the parent knows is that if you get a little baby poop on your hands, you just wipe it on your pants. And that's fine. I don't know why it's allowed, but it's allowed. Exactly. I have some PRL to move on. I'm going to start toting around some sweatpants, though. Some full size sweatpants.

Yeah, yeah. Your little spindle stiff. Oh, that's my blowout clothes. Yeah. Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic. But I'm not helping out with that at all. Our teams today are playing for glory, but also they're playing for imaginary currency

called Hank Bucks, which I will award as we play. And at the end of the episode, one of the teams will be crowned the winner. But first, we must introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from Owen. Oh, I'm so excited about this. I have to say, at first, I bemoaned it a little bit because I was like the homework of it all. And then it was like, I love.

I mean, to be able to talk about the joys of gay animal sex, like, it flowed out of me. I had like a poetic blowout, you know what I mean? Okay, so here's my poem for you all. My envy for bottlenose dolphin goosing, I'm willing to admit, when one male presses his beak into another's anterior genital slit, who whistle, blow bubbles, and push his mate through the ocean in a thrilling love act known as genital beak propulsion. Male baboons will diddle, they diddle indeed, which is just anal fingering, and they do

it with glee. About male giraffe necking, I ask, fellas, is it gay to explore all your bros' bodies without any jealousy? No, female koalas will mount each other reciprocally and show signs of intense arousal unequivocally. She'll throw back her head and let out a copulatory bellow, a sex sound that can only be described as a combination of rasping, growling, wheezing, grunting, rumbling, and braying that consists of a long series of in-drawn snore-like breaths alternating with exalted belch-like sounds perform dacapello. Spinner dolphins love paliatic orgies in what is technically called a wuzzle, a term coined by marine biologists who said, yeah, that looks like a wuzzle.

Horny prawn horns post-rump sniff perform conga line mounting, while sex-scented musk oxen kick forelegs astounding. Male harbor seals will synchronously spiral with erection in a pair rolling affair that is full of affection. Bonobos love genito-genital rubbing and they'll do it all day. Bonobos in general are just really gay. There's geckering, yippering, and rear-end flirtations, song dancing, vacuum slurping, a whole glossary of sensations. So when it comes to love languages, I hope that you've gleaned some exciting new possibilities from our animal queendom.

The end. I mean, I had several things that I Googled during that poem. Great. My glossary is expanding. You wrote a whole book. You're already published that. Yeah, let's go. Let's go. This is a. You just wrote, you wrote a whole book. You're ready to publish that.

Yeah, let's go, let's go. This is a bonus episode for us. So the topic for this week is gay animals, but before we dive in and have Sari define the topic, which I'm excited about, we're gonna take a short break. Then it'll be time to define the topic. ["Skyfall 3D World's First Game Gameplay"] Ceri, what's a gay animal? You know.

You're like that one kid. Yeah, there we go. Humans are animals and Sari Riley is bisexual. Therefore, we got a couple in the room right now. I was actually going to pundit back over to our guests, who are the experts here. I do have research that

I am willing to jump in on, but I'm curious because you have a whole podcast about gay animals. How are you defining the boundaries of gay animals? Because it is a pretty broad term that you won't necessarily find in a scientific paper. You'll find it in articles or science communicators talking about it because it's really accessible. Like you see the word gay animal and you're like, I know the vibes of that, but it's not necessarily you won't find it published in literature. I mean, that is such a good question. I would say for us in making this podcast, we are looking at a lot of different observed behaviors that are same sex. So not just mounting

and mating, but also courtship behaviors, parental behaviors, pair bonding, all of these things fall into the category for us of what is a gay behavior among mammals. And it's difficult to determine the frequency of this, though I will say there's a lot of species that do it. 1500 species have been documented to some extent. The frequency ranges among species. Some it's like there's gender parity and you see like both sexes having a lot of same sex behavior like carnivores and marsupials and waterfowl and some it's primarily the males of the species like giraffes. And so it's like hard to even see because it's just so abundant.

Sometimes it's very seasonal, like big horn sheep spend large amounts of times in sex segregated herds having just copious amounts of sex within those herds. Sometimes it's easier to see, sometimes it's harder to see. One thing we discovered a lot is scientists have a difficulty identifying same-sex behavior, especially sexual behavior among monomorphic species because there's sort of a bias that if you see two animals having sex, the one that is like topping, quote unquote, is just automatically the male and the receptive one is the female. So like pigeons for example have a lot of same-sex sexual behavior but it's hard to see that

in the human eye. So we're looking at all of these things and also looking at ourselves as well and trying to find sort of reflections of kinship among behaviors and community forming, alternative lifestyle forming, just things that we can sort of map our experiences on. It makes sense that this would not be one of the ones that's going to be a real sharp line. Yeah. And we don't want it to be, right? No, no, no.

I mean, you'd be shocked. Sometimes we have a topic we think this is going to be very easy to define. By the end of it, we have no idea what wood is. Right, right, right, right, right. Right. Right. And in a lot of ways, it's funny, because, Sarri, what you said in the beginning,

almost as a joke, that is also how we're defining it. Like, Owen and I, throughout the whole series, it's like we refer to ourselves as gay animals because we are. Like that is part of, very much part of this definition and kind of embracing and pushing back at the same time any sort of like official or technical or limited terminology or hardline way of understanding it.

And as Owen was saying, really, really going beyond understanding it. And as Owen was saying, really, really going beyond understanding it in a way that is just through the lens of how animals are having sex and seeing how animals are going about their existences and lives through family structures, through social structures. In the way that humans are starting to understand and define this concept of queerness

is how we've been in some ways approaching this idea of a gay animal. Do you feel like it overlaps or have you explored ways in which, so not only talking about these same-sex sexual behaviors or non-sexual behaviors, but also like intersex phenotypes or other ways that animals defy the gender binary, things like that. That's touched on for sure. I mean, we've specifically in the last episode, we get into, you know, different species that will change sex

over the course of their lives, and seeing that as a type of queerness or a gay animal, and this idea of transness in animal species, and the different ways that that can be interpreted. So that's definitely a part of it. I mean, that's basically all I had written down. All of you, it's like you're the experts or something like that. I appreciate what you said about it being difficult to come across and that it was something

that we've been experiencing as well. We do have sort of a sacred text that we have been working with. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the book Biological Exuberance by Bruce Fagamel that was published in 1999 and was really groundbreaking in the sense that he pulled together from margins of many different scientific studies, the small amounts of gay animal documented, observed, like distribution of gay animal and sort of put it all together and that was really huge. And so that book is sort of having a renaissance as many people are starting to reference it as we're getting a lot more books published, like Animal Homosexuality, which was edited by Paul Vasey, which looked at existing field

sites that had large amounts of data already, dolphins, bison, flamingos. So it is something where it's very scattered because it's often not a priority for the people who are looking. And especially with male-male sexual behavior, it's so often just seen as about dominance or aggression or purely serving a social function, which it is, but also sex serves a social function for humans as well. Yeah, when you said that there is like 1500 or something species documented, I was like, who dug up papers and dug up papers and dug and dug and dug and was like counting every

single one. Yeah, it's exhaustive. And I think one thing to think about or that I was thinking about as researching this topic is also how tricky it is that we have like us as human animals and then also a range of non-human animals with behaviors and experiences and instincts that are so radically different. I think this is also a hard topic to talk about because when you use accessible terms like oh these are gay dolphins or like lesbian albatrosses or or bisexual bison or things like that then people tend to Anthropomorphize and they project human social dynamics human feelings onto these animals when really

Using these more clinical language that you see in studies like same sex sexual behaviors or same sex interactions, I think tries to create this distance intentionally between what humans are doing, how humans are relating to each other sexually or non sexually in same sex relationships and what animals are doing because it gets really fraught when you start to layer on intention or right and wrong or morality.

Studying animal sex can be a really useful tool for humans to understand ourselves. And there's this idea that queerness is natural. We see it all around us, so therefore it's natural in humans too. But also there's a level of caution that you wanna use as science communicators, as scientists. When you're looking at animals

and you don't wanna say a dolphin shoving its blowhole on a slit is morally wrong if he doesn't ask permission first because dolphins are operating along a whole other code of being than like human social norms. Even if you just say same sex, like people are gonna, people like we have all this baggage that we carry into it. And so it's, you wanna try to not do that or you might actually do wanna celebrate it

and be like, oh my God, the world is so weird. Like the idea that we have that like, okay, here's the whole purpose of everything is, and like genetically, yes, the purpose of everything is to make offspring, but there are many purposes that are laid on top of that purpose, and we do not understand them.

We do not understand them for ourselves, let alone for every species on earth, of which there are many, and they're all doing wild things. And it is like, you know, the complexity just makes me love the planet, you know? It's just a good planet. Mm-hmm, yeah, that exactly.

I think that Lane and I are both coming from a place where we are enthusiasts and so we're sort of unabashedly celebrating an opportunity to explore an expansive understanding of nature. And so it is fun to be in conversation with scientists who will pull back a lot and be very technical in their descriptions for many reasons. And some of them is because they really love these animals and they don't want to have like stigma or shame projected onto them, which we do, as well as not wanting to be like, oh, these are just gay animals. And therefore, like we've figured them out, we've defined them. I think a place that we get to, or we strive to get to in our podcast

is to understand that there's a queer way of knowing that is about not knowing, that is about recognizing that animals have a capacity for pleasure that we'll never really understand because we are our own distinct species. And we just sort of have to recognize that the world is out there and it's doing things and there is mystery and there's utility to wonder and to like being in the world and like seeking yourself in it. But also just allowing animals to be animals and we're like, gay animals are, you know, they don't need to come out as anything. They're just animals doing their thing. But also, we're up against a legacy of closeting of gay animals because even though

scientists claim this objectivity, there is a lot of actual homophobia written into the document and a lot of active deletion and omission of these observations because they simply don't want to talk about anything that would veer into homosexuality. We've been observing animals for a long time and that bias has been there the whole time and it was Stronger in the past and you don't want to knock at your article published because people are like I can't put I can't put same-sex Animal couples in the journal like that's like we can't we just ends like why we can't why we can't don't stop asking Yeah for obvious reasons that we are not gonna fail out Yeah, and that has been not going to bail out.

And that has been, you know, that was happening, you know, a long time ago, but it also still happens. It is actually something that is still, you know, a thing that scientists think about when it comes to their careers, when it comes to how they'll be perceived, when it comes to whether they'll be taken seriously, when it comes to whether they'll be shoehorned into just being the scientist that is just like the gay animal scientist versus like the marine biologist scientist, you know?

So it was really interesting to talk to scientists and learn that that's actually like a paranoia that they have. And it's maybe no longer like, oh, I'm going to then be perceived as a homosexual myself, which was maybe something that they were more concerned about 40, 50, 60, 70 years ago. Maybe that's something that still comes up sometimes, but it's much more concern for their careers and for how they're going to be perceived and taken seriously and get a promotion and all of those types of things. That's still on people's minds, which was fascinating to discover.

And something that I just wanted to go back to really quickly that came up, we talked about this all the time with people that we interviewed when it came to this idea of homosexuality and queerness as something that is in fact fundamental in nature as opposed to an aberration. And that's, I think, what we're starting to shift in some of the conversations we've been having with people, as saying this is fundamental and there are reasons, actually, for things like why certain species have sex with no intent to reproduce, for instance.

As opposed to saying sometimes animals have sex and there's no intention to reproduce, but we have no idea why. Well, Lain, can I propose a solution to this problem is that animals are also horny? Like, do, like... Exactly, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, it is time to move on to the quiz portion of our show. This week we're going to be doing a gay animals truth or fail

express. One of the big lessons of biology is that trying to create categories is useful until it's not anymore. For example, many people try and cram biological sex into a binary, but humans are just one animal among many that reveal that rigid categorization will inevitably fail to capture just how diverse everything in nature and our bodies are. So today we're going to be playing Truth or Fail Express, all about ways that nature defies the idea of a sex binary. I will tell you a story, but it's up to you to figure out if it is true or is true. Yes. Or not true.

Yes, dad. There is a shrimp. It's called the Hippolyte innermis, as far as I can tell. It's a sequential hermaphroditic species where newborn shrimp that are born female can rapidly switch to becoming male. Scientists have noted that this switch peaks in the fall when populations of fish predators also peak,

leading researchers to hypothesize that the shrimp make this switch to limit reproduction during unfavorable circumstances. Ooh. Is that true or false? The only thing I know about sequential hermaphrodism is that clownfish are this way, because everyone, it's like the finding Nemo fact that after Nemo's mom died,

then his dad would have transitioned into his mom. A new mom. Become the new mom, yeah. So why not shrimp? A new mom. Become the new mom. Yeah. So why not shrimp? And I'm not a shrimp.

I'm not a shrimp. And I'm not binary. So therefore, you are what you eat. So I think it's true. I know. I want to say, that's what I was like, I want it to be true. So the question is like, is it if I want it to be? I think you nailed how we play these games Owen.

Like that's the logic behind it is you just, you go with your heart. And is there really any reason for Lane not to pick false? Because that's really, you know, playing a game, right? You're not going to get points either way. Okay. Ding, ding, ding. You've tapped into our host dynamic. Just battle it out.

It's just going, nuh-uh. The whole podcast. I'm going to also say true. I'm going to say false because I don't understand the eating, the reducing instances of mating around fish eating or whatever. Fish eating, whatever. There could be something about the pheromones they put out that could attract. Garter snakes will change. They'll do biomimicry and I think it changes.

It's about predation and about wanting a gay sex orgy. If having gay sex saves you from getting eaten. Sure. Okay. Anyway, is that a tangent? Did I do it? So what I can tell you is that the fact is false. These, the they are indeed a sequential hermaphroditic species, but instead of starting as female and switching to male, they start

as male and they switch to female. And unlike other hermaphroditic crustaceans, this shrimp makes the transition really quite quickly and doesn't go through an intermediate stage where it has like attributes of both male and female shrimp. And it happens in part triggered by their diet, which is a specific kind of like single celled organism called a diatom. And that usually thrives in the spring,

but shrimp born in the fall are born male and in the spring they go through a molt where they male go not just go away and ovary forms. Meanwhile, shrimp born in the spring will make the transition even more rapidly. It might be a way to sync up reproduction with the prevalence of food. So if there's a bunch of food around,

you have more energy where you can do, and it's hard, it's like very energy intensive. That was tricky. Opposite of what you used to. Wow, that was tricky. I mean, you're never gonna know. No one knows the facts. Unless sometimes very rarely someone will know the fact

that it's like upsetting. Exactly the fact. Yeah, I mean, it's kinda scary. Round number two, there's a nudibranch called chromadoris reticulata, and it is a simultaneous hermaphrodite, meaning that it has both male and female sex organs. Scientists have found that after mating, chromadoris reticulata will get rid of their penis simultaneous hermaphrodite, meaning that it has both male and female sex organs.

Scientists have found that after mating, chromadoris reticulata will get rid of their penis and replace it as a part of a strategy to remove competitors' sperm from their mate's organs. So what do they replace it with? Like a vacuum? Why would they do that? I don't understand. Or did they grow a new second penis? Why would you do that? I don't understand. Or did they grow a new second penis, a fresh one?

I think they might grow a fresh penis. Well, this I feel thoroughly boggled by this. I mean, it's so confusing. It's got to be true. What the hell the bogey's talking about? So why not? I feel like worm, little worm, you guys, slugs, snails, worms, all got lots of bits all at once. And they love it. You got to take advantage of you see another creature, you're going to sexually reproduce.

So I'm going to say true also. I mean, I have no idea what was said. I'm saying true because I just want to lead into the mystery of it all. It's true. We get trues across the board. Yeah. Yes. Now, what is it? Everybody's correct. All right. Oh, OK. They are simultaneous from Aphrodite's and they wanted to see it and they're like pretty, like this is often a simultaneous hermaphrodite

is most often a thing where there's not many individuals in a species because like, you know, you might run across a male, but never anybody else. And so you're going to want to breed with whoever you happen to run across. But in this case, there's actually lots of them. So they wanted to know what the heck was going on. So they looked and they watched 31 copulations

and found that after mating, the nudibranch would discard the extended part of their penis. But it turned out that they still had a longer coiled penis internally to replenish from, so the nudibranch could then mate again after about a day. And they found that sperm masses on the discarded penises contained alleles for their previous partners, like their ex's ex. So they think that they might be using their removable penis as a way to scrape sperm out

of their partner. There's like a special penis that's for removing sperm and then another second penis. They have like a fruit by the foot of penises. Yeah. I was thinking like one of those weed whackers that you just like extend the flask like it chips off, but then you got more peanuts. It's just a scrub daddy, that's what that is. Yeah.

And you just skip and dispose of it. It makes sense. Now it makes sense. All right. Good job, everyone. Our final round. White-throated sparrows are known to have either a white stripe or a tan stripe on their heads.

And it turns out that the white-striped birds mate almost exclusively with tan-striped birds and vice versa, forming what are effectively four sexes of the white-throated sparrow. Oh, starbilly, sneech kind of situation here. Damn. Yeah. I'm not buying it for a second.

I'm going false. This is, I don't know, something to storybook about this. Yeah, I don't like it. You know, art imitates life. Life imitates art, which is the way that phrase goes. There's star-belly-sneeches in real life. There's star-belly-sneeches come first, or birds. Yeah, which comes-bellied sneetches in real life. The snar-bellied sneetches come first are birds. Yeah, which comes first, the sneetch or the bird.

I think it's true. I'm going to stick with Lane on this one. Not going to abandon you, buddy. I'm going to say no. Well, for a long time, ornithologists thought that tan-striped sparrows were just like the younger white-throated sparrows. But in 1961, a bird scientist found that white-throated sparrows, but in 1961, a bird scientist found

that white-throated sparrows actually have two different color morphs, and that both male and female birds could display those morphs. But more importantly, mating pairs almost always consisted of a white stripe and a tan-striped sparrow, leading to the white-throated sparrow being described as having kind of four sexes.

Scientists have observed some pretty clear behavioral differences between the white striped and tan striped sparrows. So that seems to actually indicate something. One of them is more aggressive than the other. And in the cases where two white striped sparrows mate, the pairing is apparently not that great because they'll just fight a bunch. It's less clear if anything goes particularly wrong with two tan striped sparrows who are the less aggressive ones.

I feel like this is getting into the realm of like zodiac sign. How do you have a relationship with two Duras? I love that to have like a signal that says something about your behavior that's like visible to your potential mate and you're like, I can't hook up with another one. That would be very messy. Yeah. It's not like we do that with our plumes. Sometimes I look at a guy and I'm like, yeah, I'll fight you. You don't have to put words in your mouth, but for me.

So that means that Team Tangent has five points and Team Field Guide to Gay Animals has two. Not that I care. Next up, we're going to take a short break. Then time for another fierce competition. Welcome back, everybody. Sari has got our next game for us and I get to play. Yeah, we're tag teaming out. The whole dream team. Team scrub daddy is at it again.

Boys night on tangents. Okay, so when it comes to sex ed, people always talk about the birds and the bees. And it turns out that both birds and insects have displayed all kinds of same sex behaviors. So in this game of this or that, the rules are, you guess whether each behavior I describe is a bird or a bug, because I had trouble finding the facts for straight up views.

So, bird or bug, is your this or that. So question one, in this animal's mating display, two males actually team up and cooperate to make noises and jump around until someone else comes along, ready to be wooed. The target of this wooing can either be a female or a juvenile male, though only one moves forward with copulation if the target is willing. Is this describing a bird or a bug? You said they jump? They jump around? They jump around, yes. They make noises and they jump around.

I mean, that could be either. Yeah, right. There's lots of song dancing happening among birds. Yeah, I feel like there's probably both a bird and a bug that does something that could be described this way. I know. I mean, birds definitely do what was just described. Not to say that that's the answer, but the real question is, do birds do that? I've seen a bird do that. Okay, we're going to go with that. So, I mean, my question is, so you're walking by and you see these two birds or bugs doing

this like courtship display, but then you only get to fuck one of them. Yes. What's happening? Okay. I'm Sam. You feel birds. I'm feeling birds now after Owen said it the way.

Yeah, just said it. I feel like birds would be like more. They'd be like, we know what's going on and Bug would be like, ah, I'll just eat everybody or something. They wouldn't be, bugs ain't teamwork into that level unless there's certain kinds of bugs. So I'm gonna say, I think Bird. And Lane said they saw a bird do it.

I believe that Lane saw it. Exactly, I mean, right, what is more convincing, what Owen said or me having literally seen it? No. No. No. No. No. No. I don't even remember what Owen said or me having literally seen it. No. I don't even remember what Owen said. Well, fortunately, we're all unanimous in this. You're all unanimous and you're all correct.

Your eyes laying and your poetic description, Owen, are correct. This description was specifically written towards describing the blue-backed mannequin, which is a little brightly colored forest bird in South America. This behavior is technically part of lecking. A lek, L-E-K, is an aggregation of when a bunch of male animals get together and then start dancing, singing, whatnot to try and attract a mate. But what's interesting about this bird is that it is a cooperative display rather than competitive. So two male birds, kind of wingmen for each other, hooting and hollering,

jumping. And then whether a juvenile male flies up or a female, then they do the same dance with them and do this whole pre-copulation ritual. I'm not sure if they've actually seen mounting between the male birds and the juvenile males, but it's definitely this whole courtship ritual that they go through with one another. And as we were talking about in the definition part, when you have a bunch of males in the same place, that it's hard to tell what exactly is going on. And so it's

possible that that's happening, but this is only as far as we've observed. But congratulations all. You have seen a bird do it. Yeah, I've seen a bird. Lane, is that exactly the bird that you saw do it? Yeah. Yeah, it was actually was it was 2009 and I'll never forget it that I'd be like, oh, sure. South American. I almost said that. Brazil. Really formative experience for me. OK, so question number two, when males of this species can't find females to pair

up with, they tend to give up and build a nest with another male. This increases their survival rate compared to single males. But it's not necessarily a happily ever after. If this male-male duo stumbles upon the nest of a heterosexual couple, they might cooperate to kill that male and then one of them will mate with the female to pass along his genes. So is this assassin duo a bird or a bug? I feel like because there's a nest, the obvious thing to say is bird,

because birds do nests and bugs don't, which makes me think it's definitely bugs. Yeah, I don't wanna think about this level of bird murder also. I also don't like bird murder. But they are being a team and I said bugs wouldn't do that. I mean, birds will get up to some shenanigans when it comes to home wrecking for sure. Stealing eggs, taking over nests, baby killing.

But I also feel like the trickery involved is that we're meant to believe the nest equals bird. So it must be bug. Unless it's one step further, which is like, it's nest and so we're supposed to think bug, but then it's actually bird. You know what I mean? If it's a bird, it's absolutely buck wild. If it's a bird, it's absolutely buck wild. If it's a bug, it's absolutely buck wild.

Like, it's like, either way. Do spiders count as bugs, Sari? Yeah. I'm guessing it's some kind of arachnid. I think they're up to something. Well, we're not going to, but we don't, even if it's not, we still get if it's bug. Oh, yeah.

That's as I'm trying to be smart. I'm trying to draw. I'm thinking that it's a bird. Yeah, I think the nest is maybe supposed to lead us astray, but I think it's a bird too. I just, you know, I can see a couple like gay villains, you know, they meet, they court, they build a nest, then their villain arc begins. Like this works for birds, yeah.

Well, it is a bug. My friends know me too well. This is describing the Japanese termite, which do actually- Solitary termites? Solitary, yeah, they form nesting pairs in nesting wood. And so in this study, they collected colonies of reproductive stage termites between 2013 and 2015.

And they found that these male termites weren't able to survive on their own, but those that make nests with another male survived for longer. And so this coupling behavior, they didn't mount each other. They didn't observe sexual behavior, but it was like a survival behavior to survive long enough to then pass on their genes another way. To go and murder a man. But it is a villain arc. They they're just normal little termites and then they find their perfect match.

And this is a picture of the birds murdering. This is what that person was talking about when she passed by on the phone and said, and they were roommates. Talking about termites. Talking about murder. But Owen is right, Owen and Lane are both right, that this does kind of, this debauchery happens in birds as well. A similar kind of nest stealing happens in black swans, but they don't make their own

nests or kill the male. They just scope out, they either form temporary threesome with females to obtain eggs or steal preformed nests with eggs laid in them. But there isn't this like nesting together. They can't build a nest. But these male termites are real homebodies. They can make a nest together and get cozy. So question three, final question. Sometimes reproductive behaviors can get a little rough.

And when the male of this animal initiates mating, it grips so hard that it can leave two to six gouges that can get worse with repeat mating attempts. When a scientist examined hundreds of male and female specimens in two research collections, they found similar wounds on both, though at a lower rate in males, so indicating that mating is happening regardless of the sex. Is this a bird or a bug? That's a bird. That's a bird. Yeah, I don't think a bug can get two to six gouges and be okay

I don't think they're walking away from that. I think we also like we have we have lots of dead birds in museums Museums are just filled with dead birds like bring out your dead birds. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, just the drawers and drawers and drawers of dead birds. Okay. I trust Hank on this one. I'm going to go on with him. I think it's a bug. I don't know why. Yeah, I Mm-hmm. The classic strategy, well, they do know something. It is a bug. Yes. Now, tell them what we know.

Tell them. Tell them what we know. Yeah. Yeah. You know what bug it is? Oh, what bug is it? It's OK if not. I wasn't sure if you actually knew.

This is a fact that you knew. No, I don't. I don't. I'm trying to think. I don't know if you actually knew this is a fact that you knew. I don't. I don't. I don't know. Wow. They're dragonflies. So dragonflies, to form this wheel or heart-shaped mating configuration, if you search dragonfly

mating, the male's abdomen or the end of its tail has appendages on it that grip into the head of the female or another male leaving these gouges. And so this paper from 1991 just looked at a bunch of dragonfly specimens and found that these pinned insects, they all had similar scarring on their heads in both females and almost all of the female dragonflies, but also a non-insignificant number of the mature male specimens as well. And so it's hard to say again what causes this phenomenon. Is it aggression? Is it pleasure?

Is it, I don't know, mistaken mating attempts? You can't tell the sex of who you're copulating with. All of these hypotheses are hard to see because you can't really study the behavior in the wild. It's just based on these wounds that we know are mating inflicted. But they got drawers full of bugs at museums too, I guess. Yeah, they got lots of bugs in addition to the dead birds. They got that too. Just them makes sense.

Bring those glass cases, you know. Much less space also. You can have so many dragonflies in a box. True. Yeah. And our final score is Team Tangents has come out on top with nine. Nine to Field Guide Six. Yeah, but I feel like we won in like a gay way.

Which is to not win. And also, you know, it does show that gay animals aren't a game to us, you know? That's right. I know. And now it's time to ask the science couch where we've got a listener question for our couch of finely honed scientific minds. At Maya Beard on Twitter asks, are there any historians will say they were best friends? I was doing the air quotes that whole time on the podcast.

You're listening. Situations where it was likely they were actually gay, but past scientists didn't consider it. Oh, I mean, only like that. Like that was the norm. Right. Like you were talking earlier about how like it's aggression. Yeah, yeah. Like it's just sort of a dominance display or a way of instead of just hitting heads together, you just have sex.

And it's like, that's the same. Yeah, so often it's just obscured with the language of like establishing hierarchy about aggression. And there are so many scientists that we learned about who deeply hid their information. George Murray Leveque studied Adélie penguins and then put all of his observations about gay penguin behavior in secret code

so that people wouldn't be able to know what was actually happening, which is essentially to say that somebody was like, oh, they were just roommates. We can read between those lines. It's coded language. It's like there. But he literally had a secret code that he used when he talked about the male-male behavior of Adélie penguins. He specifically used the Greek alphabet. I wrote down that example too because it's I feel like the quintessential one that came to my mind. He went on an Antarctic expedition in 1910 and published two papers about Adélie penguins on the way back about the natural history of the Adélie penguin and then as Antarctic penguins, a way back about the natural history of the Delhi penguin and then Antarctic

penguins, a study of their social habits. But in these two papers, he dodged around the point and made references to non-breeding wanderers or unpaired males or things like that. He called them hooligan cocks, which I think is a great term of phrase. But then more recently, they found an unpublished paper, like a pamphlet called The Sexual Habits of the Adélie Penguin that was found in the British National History Museum. That's where he documented observations of sexual behaviors, which included this homosexual sexual behaviors as well as non-procreative sex, so that again, that sex for pleasure, as well as I think, again, putting human morality

on all these things like sexual coercion and necrophilia and other sexual behaviors that are seen as like blasphemous or obscene to humans, but they're animals. They're animals doing animal things. And he wrote, rewrote certain entries in Greek letters or things like that to physically obscure it, which is some of the most dramatic examples of covering it up. Yes. Yeah. Wild. And a lot of it is hidden in language like aberration or, I'm thinking of a paper about butterflies that was titled the lowering of moral standards among Lepidoptera and it was about gay butterflies.

Or the perversion of male beetles. Yeah, about cock chafers. Yeah. I have some of those too. 1676, an English naturalist, Francis Willoughby described partridges as very salacious birds, infamous for masculine venery and other abominable and unnatural conjunctions. And the quail was also written about by Linnaeus in 1758. So again, a genetic sky as a bird, no less salacious than the partridge,

infamous also for obscene and unnatural lust. So like you were saying. What a wild thing to use the word unnatural. Yeah. Quails. Quails. Just bumping each other. They must have watched too many TV shows.

They listened to one too many David Bowie albums and it really got them. Maybe it's just a phase. We talked to one marine biologist who said that she studied dolphins starting in the 80s and then she didn't actually publish for over 25 years. She started seeing same sex, sexual behavior in the 80s in Shark Bay, Australia and waited until 2006 before she published anything in public

because of all of this hesitation for all of these reasons. And when she did, she got a lot of pushback of people saying, what are you trying to say? What are you saying about these dolphins? Are you saying this? Are you saying that? And she was just like, I'm literally just saying, this is what they're doing.

I'm out there on the boat and this is what they're doing. Writing a case for four. That's what they're doing. Yeah, yeah. So a lot of that is still happening. If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents or check out our YouTube community tab

where we will send out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Or you can join our Patreon and then you can ask us on our Discord. Thank you to at 23SkidSkydsy and at Amanda Wears and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode. You guys, thank you so much.

Where can we listen to your podcast? You can listen to Field Guide to Gay Animals, which comes out June 13th on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, all the podcast places. That's where it will be. So we're really excited about it. Thank you so much for coming on

and sharing your passion and expertise. Thank you so much for having us. This was so fun. Yeah, it was really, really fun. If you like SciShow Tangents and want to help us out, it's super easy to do that. You can go to patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents and become a patron. Give access to our Discord and our bonus content like our Minions commentary. Shout out to patron Les Aker specifically for their support. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen.

That helps us know what you like about the show and other people. It helps them find us. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Hmm. Hmm. Whoa.

Whoa. So we got the world. Okay. Yeah. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. Yeah. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green.

I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Sam Schultz. I've been Owen Ever. I've been Lane Cuffin-Levinson. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Jess Stimpert. Our associate producer is Eve Schmidt. Our editor is Seth Hicksman. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz-Bazio.

Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound designer is Joseph Tunamettish. Our executive producers are Nicole Sweeney and me, Hank Green, and of course, we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you, and remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. Even the Greek philosopher Aristotle was writing about gay animals way back in 350 BC in his book, History of Animals. Specifically, he noted that if there was no male pigeon around, female pigeons would sometimes mount each other and lay smaller infertile eggs called wind eggs, which sometimes contained

yolks but sometimes were all egg white. Wind eggs actually form any time tissue other than a yolk ends up in a bird's oviduct. And they have lots of different names including fairy egg, witch egg, rooster egg, or fart egg. I'll see you all at Waffle House. This is the full translated quote from Aristotle. Another singularity in these birds is that the hens tread one another when a cock is not forthcoming after kissing one another just as takes place in the normal pairing. Though they do not impregnate one another, they lay more eggs under these than under ordinary circumstances.

No chicks, however, result therefrom, but all such eggs are wind eggs. And that's the description on the Waffle House menu. Yeah. That's good.