Saturday, June 9, 2012

'Sexual depravity' of penguins

George Murray Levick spent the Antarctic summer of 1911-12 observing the colony of Adelies at Cape Adare, making him the only scientist to this day to have studied an entire breeding cycle there.
During that time, he witnessed males having sex with other males and also with dead females, including several that had died the previous year. He also saw them sexually coerce females and chicks and occasionally kill them. Levick blamed this "astonishing depravity" on "hooligan males" and wrote down his observations in Greek so that only an educated gentleman would understand the horrors he had witnessed. Back in Britain he produced a paper (in English), titled Natural History of the Adelie Penguin.
 However, the section about the animal's sexual proclivities was deemed to be so shocking it was removed to preserve decency. Levick then used this material as the basis for a separate short paper, Sexual Habits of the Adelie Penguin, which was privately circulated among a handful of experts. In fact, Levick's observations turned out to be well ahead of their time. Scientists had to wait another 50 years before the remarkable sexual antics of the Adelie were revealed. By this time his pamphlet and its detailed records of Adelie shenanigans had been lost to science .
 But now a copy of Sexual Habits of the Adelie Penguin has been unearthed, thanks to sleuthing by Douglas Russell, curator of birds at the Natural History Museum, who discovered a copy among records of the work of Scott's expeditions and has had it published in the journal Polar Record, with an accompanying analysis of Levick's work.

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