The Creative Lives of Animals by Carol Gigliotti

Author:Carol Gigliotti [Gigliotti, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: NAT011000 NATURE / Environmental Conservation & Protection
Publisher: NYU Press

Or look at dolphins. The bottle-nosed dolphin is catholic in its choice of sex partners. Males are frequently sighted copulating with turtles . . . with sharks and eels. Eels? Yes, when a dolphin’s penis is erect, it has a hook on the end—and many a male will use it to hook a writhing, struggling eel.28

This gets my vote for the most creative approach to a masturbatory tool I have found, though I cannot imagine that the eel would agree. Spinner dolphins are also the creators, as far as we know, of beak-genital propulsion, a lovely form of same-sexual swimming in which “one dolphin will insert its beak into the other’s genitals and gently propel the two of them forward, maintaining penetration while they swim together. The pushee may also turn on its side or rotate belly up during this activity.”29

Which brings us to same-sex pair bonding, at times a gentler and more affectionate side of animal sexual behavior, signaled by the word “bonding.” Bagemihl lists three species of birds about which extensive tracking and documentation exist for same-sex long-term pair bonding. Pair bonds that have lasted up to 15 years in Greylag Geese and six years in Humboldt Penguins have been reported, while Silver Gulls may have several long-term same-sex partnerships during their lives.30 Records point to fifteen other bird species having lifelong same-sex partnerships, from six years to the lower number of two or three due to the short life of the particular species. Animals often committing to the opposite sex for the long term include wolves, coyotes, black vultures, prairie voles, sandhill cranes, gibbons, bald eagles, albatrosses, barn owls, and beavers.

Coyotes living both in the wild and in urban areas are socially monogamous, pair bonding for many years, and exhibit behavior that speaks to this long-term union: remaining tied for twenty minutes after copulation, defending territories together, and participating in group howls. They produce a yearly litter, usually large, and care for their pups over a long dependency period. Both parents help with pup and den duties. They do not divorce, but only separate when one dies.31 Janet Kessler, a naturalist and ethologist who has spent 13 years video-documenting the lives of coyotes in and around San Francisco, describes the behavior of a bonded pair in one of her videos of them:

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