London, Oct 22 (IANS) According to a new study, lack of female company drives penguins to short-term gay flings.
Scientists who studied a colony of king penguins discovered that even though more than 25 percent of the males were in same-sex pairs, only two birds bonded permanently.
Even those two penguins were later seen caring for eggs as part of a heterosexual pair.
Experts believe that lack of female penguins in the colony may drive males into some same-sex flirting, reports the Daily Mail.
Gay ‘flirting’ could also be due to high levels of testosterone within the colony among males, according to the journal Ethology.
The team from the Centre for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology in Montpellier, France, studied king penguins on the Antarctic Island of Kerguelen to better understand their mating behaviour.
During the mating season, king penguins displayed with potential partners by closing their eyes, stretching their heads skyward and then looking at each other.
In their study, the researchers found that 28.3 percent of the birds studied displayed to penguins of the same-sex.
One theory behind the same-sex pairing was that penguins paired up with other males because they could not tell the difference between the sexes and so paired at random.
But Director of Research Stephen Dobson told the BBC that this theory no longer stood up.
‘I found that the rate of homosexually displaying pairs was significantly lower than one would expect by chance,’ he said.
Out of all the same-sex displaying penguins, only one male-male pair and one female-female pair had learned the song of their partner, the researchers found.
‘So these pairs can bond. But, bonded pairs can split up if one finds a more preferred partner,’ Dobson added.
