Animal Species That Practice Same-Sex Coupling

Penguins are among the better-known examples of same-sex coupling in the animal kingdom and one of the most observed over a long span of time. The British explorer George Murray Levick reported coupling among male Adélie penguins during the Scott Antarctic Expedition of 1910-13, according to The Guardian. Leverick was horrified, not only by the homosexuality but also by some males' tendency to kill chicks, coerce females, and attempt to mate with the dead (the latter behavior has since been explained as the behavior of confused, inexperienced males who mistake dead penguins with compliant mates). He chalked all of it up to hooliganism amongst the birds and restricted these observations to private papers kept within professional circles.

Levick's paper, "Sexual Habits of the Adélie Penguin," has since been made public and corroborated by later studies. And we now know that same-sex coupling, far from a horrific aberration of hooligan Adélies, is found in many penguin species. The museum studies program at Tufts University has collected news reports on chinstrap, Magellenic, Gentoo, King, Humboldt, and African penguins forming male-male and female-female couples in captivity. Both sexes invest in rearing young in the wild, and same-sex couples may seek to become parents. Zoos can enable adoptions of any excess eggs laid by heterosexual pairs ⁠— which doesn't entirely prevent egg thievery. That practice may go on in the wild, but it's difficult to know for certain when there's so little physical difference between the sexes of any penguin species.

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