Biologists need to take a more nuanced view of ‘same-sex behaviour’ in animals, say the authors of a new review article on the topic.

Male-male and female-female interactions have been “extensively documented in non-human animals”, write University of California, Riverside researchers Nathan Bailey and Marlene Zuk. However they want to see scientists looking more towards the evolutionary consequences of same-sex behaviour, not just on why it occurs.

“It’s clear that same-sex sexual behaviour extends far beyond the well-known examples that dominate both the scientific and popular literature: for example, bonobos, dolphins, penguins and fruit flies,” says Bailey (press release).

He adds that researchers may be looking at widely different behaviours under the same ‘same-sex behaviours’ banner. “For example, male fruit flies may court other males because they are lacking a gene that enables them to discriminate between the sexes. But that is very different from male bottlenose dolphins, who engage in same-sex interactions to facilitate group bonding, or female Laysan Albatross that can remain pair-bonded for life and cooperatively rear young.”

Most of the coverage of this paper focuses on the press release line that same-sex behaviour can be found everywhere in the animal kingdom (eg MSNBC, Daily Telegraph).

Wired notes the study’s warning that “biologists tend to oversimplify such behaviour” and says “When it comes to same-sex sexual behaviour, scientists need to keep an open mind.”

Snarky Brit technology site The Register clearly didn’t read the paper before writing the headline ‘Gay animals going at it like rabbits’. Or if they did they didn’t heed the note in the glossary that the terms gay and lesbian are “often misapplied in the popular media to animals that have been observed to engage in same-sex mating behaviour”.

The paper is published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

Image: female-female pair of Laysan Albatross / Eric VanderWerf