Whales are terribly sensuous creatures. These blubbery our bodies are extremely delicate, and sensitised. At social conferences, pods of sperm, humpback and proper whales will roll round each other’s our bodies for hours at a time. I’ve seen a bunch of proper whales engaged in foreplay and penetration lasting a complete morning.
I’ve additionally watched a male-female couple so blissfully conjoined that they appeared unbothered by our little fishing boat as they handed beneath it. And in what could sound like a profession of cetacean voyeurism, I’ve additionally been caught up in a fast-moving superpod of dusky dolphins frequently penetrating one another at pace, whatever the gender of their companion.
That’s why this week’s report of the primary scientifically documented male-to-male sexual interactions between two humpback whales off the coast of Hawaii isn’t a surprise.
The exceptional picture of a two-metre whale penis coming into one other male “leaves little room for dialogue that there’s a sexual element to such behaviour”, as one whale scientist, Jeroen Hoekendijk on the Wageningen Marine Analysis institute within the Netherlands, notes drily.
Actually, one of many whales was ailing and there was hypothesis that the encounter could not have been consensual or that the wholesome whale was truly giving consolation to the opposite. Regardless of the fact, such “flagrant” acts additionally expose lots of our human presumptions about sexuality, gender and id.
Off the north-west Pacific coast of the US, male orcas usually go away household pods to rub their erections in opposition to one another’s bellies. However females have additionally reportedly been seen participating in sexual contact with each other, too.
Certainly, the graphic accounts of male-to-male behaviour could masks many “unseen” female-to-female sexual interactions.
Dr Conor Ryan, an honorary analysis fellow on the Scottish Affiliation for Marine Science, notes: “It’s straightforward to visibly determine male ‘gay’ intercourse when an extruded penis might be two metres lengthy.” It’s much less straightforward to diagnose when feminine sperm whales are seen “cuddling”, as Hoekendijk observes.
Ryan has usually witnessed same-sex behaviour between whales and dolphins. “I’m within the issues that we miss,” he says. He has recorded aggressive behaviour by humpback whales in teams that gave the impression to be usually male, akin to pursuing different whales.
However they proved, from DNA samples, to be genetically feminine. He speculates that humpback females could even use whale tune – hitherto considered the province of mating males.
“If I have been a feminine being harassed by sexy males, possibly I’d sing too,” says Ryan. “To draw extra females, to take consideration off me, whereas masquerading as a male.”
These observations throw up new concepts about the best way these animals behave. Whale society is sort of overwhelmingly matriarchal. Feminine sperm whales, for instance, journey in giant teams – typically hundreds robust – wherein males are solely “helpful” for his or her sperm, visiting the teams briefly, then leaving the females to their very own society.
Male-oriented science has prior to now made numerous judgments relating to sexual behaviour. However the concept of lesbian whales shouldn’t be stunning. Ryan even cites the case of a “non-binary” beaked whale, which was found to have each female and male genitalia.
after e-newsletter promotion
Even figuring out as a species might be fluid for cetaceans. In 2022, close to Caithness in Scotland, a bottlenose dolphin was discovered to be figuring out as a porpoise, swimming with a pod of porpoises and utilizing their vocalisations. In one of many nice queer pairings of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf referred to her lover, Vita Sackville-West, as “my porpoise”.
We can not know the way whales and dolphins themselves regard genital interactions. However generally they seem to get pleasure from them – with out, maybe, the preconceptions we people as a species have traditionally projected upon such behaviour. They might make nice clickbait on social media, however they’ve an necessary relevance for us, too.
When the Canadian biologist Bruce Bagemihl printed his e-book Organic Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Pure Variety – itemizing 450 species exhibiting such behaviour, together with whales and dolphins – it was utilized in proof in a US supreme court docket case in 2003 that struck down, as unconstitutional, homophobic “sodomy” legal guidelines being utilized in Texas.
It’s telling, too, that the best-known work of literary fiction written about whales, Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick, is a decidedly queer e-book. Melville conflates the queerness and variety of his characters – his narrator, Ishmael, is asserted married to his shipmate, the multi-tattooed Queequeg, based mostly on a Māori warrior – with the mysterious sensuality of the whales he’s describing. He even spends a complete chapter describing a whale’s foreskin, with joyful innuendo.
The ocean itself appears to be a queer place, the place gender is at finest a slippery notion at instances. Slipper shells caught collectively on the seaside, which you would possibly discover when beachcombing, are in truth altering intercourse, from feminine on the backside to male on the prime. Cetaceans’ genitals are hid, in any case, in genital slits. Smooth and streamlined, it’s as if bothersome sexual definitions have been overtaken by the sheer fantastic thing about wondrous hydrodynamics.
A lot of what we venture on to whales and dolphins is about our personal complexes. They appear to steer a free and straightforward life. They might not possess arms to control, however they’ve the largest brains on the planet, and extremely sensual our bodies to match. Having been round for tens of millions of years, it’s tempting to think about their long-evolved existence as one that’s past all of the issues that appear to carry us people again.
