Every so often in recent years the press have got excited about same-sex couples in nature: probably never moreso than when they find same-sex penguin couples.
Nearly ten years ago, New York Central Park Zoo male penguins Silo and Roy hit the headlines with an article in The New York Times detailing their relationship. Their relationship had caught the attention of the zookeepers who had given them an abandoned egg to raise: their adoptive daughter Tango had in turn found herself a girlfriend.
Soon after though, Silo’s head was turned by a female penguin from California, and it turned out not all gay penguins are gay.
New York Times interviewed Frans de Waal, the director of the Living Links Center at Emory University in Atlanta.
“Exclusive homosexuality is not very common in nature,” he said. And, anyway, he said, “bisexual” would be a better term for animals, adding, “They’re sometimes described as gay animals, but they really aren’t.”
The couple’s relationship had been the subject of the children’s book And Tango Makes Three.
