The discovery, published in 1977, triggered a controversy that shook the core of conservative Christianity and right wing of US politics. “At the time it was, I believe, the first published work on homosexuality in any wild animal,” George says. “The extreme right was very distressed.”
Their prevailing argument against homosexuality was that it wasn’t found in nature—God’s creation—and was therefore unnatural, and against God’s will. The presence of happily coupled female gulls poked a pretty big hole in that logic. “When people have their fundamental arguments compromised, they aren’t happy about it,” George says. [...]
The Hunts found that 14% of the gull pairs on the island were comprised of two females. One telltale sign of a lesbian nest was a “supernormal clutch,” meaning more eggs than a single female could possibly produce. [...]
And once paired, the lesbian couples stuck together. Gulls are known monogamists. “The female-female pairs stayed together from one year to the next. Those that had viable eggs were perfectly able to raise them,” George says. [...]
Since then, homosexual behavior has been documented in many hundreds of species, though an exact number is hard to come by (the New York Times suggests 450, the University of Oslo put the figure at 1,500), with various animals—albatrosses, for example—exhibiting the same type of apparently non-sexual, long-term, same-sex pairing the Hunts found in the gulls.
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