ex-gay penguin program a failure at German zoo

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Irvine511

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[q]Germany's gay zoo penguins still fending off female advances Wed Feb 8, 3:08 PM ET



Six gay penguins at a German zoo are still refusing to mate with females of the species flown in from Sweden in 2005, the zoo said.

The problem was that the female Humboldt penguins have proven too shy in their advances, the director of the zoo in the northern port city of Bremerhaven said.

"The Swedes will not make the first move," Heike Kueck said.

The females were flown in last year in a bid to bring the males to mate and help save the Humboldt species from extinction.

Kueck said last year she was optimistic the initiative would be successful because zoo keepers had noticed that at one point a female penguin had managed to cause a couple of males to "separate".

The zoo has 10 male penguins of which six have shown strong signs of preferring male company and formed couples among themselves.

The initiative to "turn" the penguins and make them mate had prompted a furious response from gay rights groups.

In a statement posted on its Internet website, the zoo on Wednesday sought to defend itself from fresh criticism.

"We will be delighted if the penguins form even one heterosexual couple and manage to produce first an egg, and then a little one," it said.

"But of course we accept the male couples that have formed and we are not trying to enforce heterosexuality, as we were accused of doing last year."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/2006020...pIH_I5Ws0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3NW1oMDRpBHNlYwM3NTc

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lilpenguins.jpg
 
Irvine511 said:




i refuse to watch a movie where baby animals die.

:tsk:

For some reason, I wasn't expecting death so when it happened it shocked me a bit. But overall, it was a wonderful documentary.

Penguins have so many socio-cultural behaviors that resemble us. Humans, we're really not that special in comparison to the rest of nature. We just like to think we are.
 
at the risk making myself sound like a complete idiot...

i'll acknowledge that these are animals simply acting on natural instinct and am ready to follow that evidence to its logical conlusion.

however, if enough of these penguins fail to mate in a procreative fashion, it would appear from what was said in the article, that this particular species will become extinct. were there other factors involved in this process? undoubtedly yes. but the males reluctance to mate with females appears to be their ultimate undoing as a species.

so without making any value judgements, where does that put this particular instinct in the system of natural selection? if species continue through a survival of the fittest, then does that mean that something that causes them not to survive is a weakness or flaw? and if so, does that mean that this particualr instinct that these animals have is a weakness or flaw? or is nature less concerned with the continuation of species and more concerned with the happiness of individual forms of life?
 
shrmn8rpoptart said:
at the risk making myself sound like a complete idiot...

i'll acknowledge that these are animals simply acting on natural instinct and am ready to follow that evidence to its logical conlusion.

however, if enough of these penguins fail to mate in a procreative fashion, it would appear from what was said in the article, that this particular species will become extinct. were there other factors involved in this process? undoubtedly yes. but the males reluctance to mate with females appears to be their ultimate undoing as a species.

so without making any value judgements, where does that put this particular instinct in the system of natural selection? if species continue through a survival of the fittest, then does that mean that something that causes them not to survive is a weakness or flaw? and if so, does that mean that this particualr instinct that these animals have is a weakness or flaw? or is nature less concerned with the continuation of species and more concerned with the happiness of individual forms of life?

Maybe God thinks they make cute couples. :)
 
If homosexual penguins have siblings then they share 50% of their genetic material with them, having a nonbreeding sib to increase the fitness of neices and nephews could be a reason that the factors for this behaviour pop up at a certain frequency within the population.
 
i'm very ignorant, how do they increase the fitness of their nieces and nephews? i just don't take the meaning. are they out foraging for the youngsters? or does it thin out the possible breeding pool, increasing the chance that the fittest will find each other? (which seems like it would be counterintuitive)

sorry, i haven't taken bio since 2001, so i'm struggling to remember some of this stuff (if i ever learned it in the first place)
 
Well fitness would be probability of reproductive success, the passing on of genetic material through sex.

Lets say that a chick without an additional helping adult has a 30% chance at breeding sucessfully (there may be a shortage of food or strong sexual selection, the cause is irrelevent). In that situation being a parent without a helping "gay" sibling would mean that 50% of your genetic material goes into your offspring who have a 30% chance at surviving. Take 50% of 30% and you get your 15%

Now if you are a sibling you share 50% genetic material with your siblings (first order relatives). Now if they have a chick with another then the offspring will share 25% genetic material with you, now if aiding this chick increases it's reproductive sucess rate to 80% (look just pulling numbers out of thin air to illustrate a point, but in borderline starvation conditions having an additional adult to forage could be useful) then you have 25% of that 80% genetic material. By being celibate or homosexual and assisting in the raising the chick then that 20% (25% of 80%) goes to you.

The 80% chance of passing down 25% of genetic material (20%) is better than a 30% chance of passing down 50% of your genetic material (15%) and families with "gay genes" (or the causative factors, it is not going to be reducable to a single switch) would be favoured.

Homosexuality is a behaviour that occurs in the natural world, as is altruisitc behaviour and things that at first glance do not make sense in an evolution red in tooth and claw view but do when we look at it in a nuanced way of how those behaviours are beneficial to individual genetic material then they yield logical and testable answers.
 
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