On a dark November afternoon at Southampton’s City Farm, the animals go about their business. They are all rescues. Penny the pig, a pair of former chickens from a battery farm, three pygmy goats, and Salvatore the cane snake, so orange and shiny he seems to glow from within as he wraps himself around my arm in a loving, even sensual embrace.
All little miracles in themselves. But none are as strange as the dull-looking brown shells in the glass tank in the corner. “Who is that there?” I ask Hannah, whose responsibility they are. “They are African land snails,” she tells me. ‘They just laid their eggs. They were both females, but because they were hermaphrodites, one changed sex. It was quite a surprise.”
Animals strike curious poses, the artist formerly known as Prince sang, and new research confirms him. A scientific report published last week detailing how serotine bats in a Dutch church perform non-penetrative sex rituals raises all kinds of interesting questions about what animals get up to in the pursuit of pleasure or the transmission of their genes.
The bats have shown the first example we know of of mammals mating without penetration. Scientists have long been baffled by the fact that a man’s erect penis is much wider than a woman’s vagina, making penetration problematic at best. They now believe that semen is transferred simply through contact with the vulva.
It’s fascinating stuff. But it’s typical for people to imagine that we have a monopoly on inventive methods of sexual engagement. Cetaceans are particularly creative and diverse when it comes to sex: because they have big brains and expert foraging techniques, they need to find something to do with their free time. Dolphins are known to mate up to three times within five minutes at great speed while swimming together, often in large numbers – a sort of mass orgy on the move.
Dolphins appear to be addicted to sex games, and males have been seen inserting their penises into the orifices of sharks, into the gaps between the bodies and shells of turtles, and even into dead fish. Their larger cetacean relatives are equally adventurous. From the shores of Cape Cod, I have seen pods of highly endangered North Atlantic right whales—huge, 60-foot-long animals—engaged in foreplay for three hours or more.
What’s most amazing is that, at least to us, counterintuitive is that they get into shallow water to do so, roll around each other’s smooth black bodies and touch each other with rubbery fins. It’s a display that looks rather idyllic until you realize that, in their determination to pass on their genes, two males will enter a female at the same time. The male whale has the largest testicles, weighing almost a ton, of any animal on earth; their penises are up to three meters long. As I watched this leviathan spectacle of lust from an otherwise deserted beach, I realized that there was a gray seal sitting at the water’s edge, also watching and reluctant to go back into the sea, for fear of the cetaceans that loved it. would tumble in ecstasy.
After primates, whales and dolphins are evolutionarily closest to us. Herman Melville noted in Moby-Dick (as a wry humorist he cannot have been entirely ignorant of the ambiguity of his title) that whales, unlike almost every other animal, mate face to face. To spare the blushes of his Victorian readers, he said it shyly: ‘When the whales are overflowing with mutual appreciation, more hominum [in the manner of human beings].” His line came to mind in the Indian Ocean, when a pair of enormous sperm whales came together, belly to belly, clinging to their sides, and happily swam, glassy-eyed and oblivious, beneath our little fishing boat.
Cetaceans, like primates such as bonobos, also blur the boundaries between what is sexual, reproductive, cultural, or social; like humans, they separate sex and reproduction. Bonobos will use sexual contact to defuse social tensions. They also express their homosexuality easily and often – just like whales.
Male killer whales regularly have penetrative sex with each other, apparently practicing for mating with females. But what do we know? The artists Gilbert & George got quite excited when I told them that whales practiced homosexuality. The famous orca researcher Dr. Lance Barrett-Lennard has recorded that during 126 excursions, homosexual behavior was overwhelmingly observed, while heterosexual coupling was rarely observed. Queer is the norm when it comes to whales, it seems.
Sperm whales often touch each other with their pectoral or dorsal fins when they gather in socially active groups. But adult males will also use erect penises (normally tucked away, in their detumescent state, in a crevice in their abdomen) as social appendages, apparently for greeting, or to hook other, younger whales, possibly their offspring, to them as a kind of hug. . (Sperm whales, by the way, got their name from human hunters who first pierced their large square heads and believed that the milky oil that flowed out was sperm.)
The liquid, paradisiacal otherness of the sea seems to enable transformations of sex and gender. It is the original place from which we came, and we are increasingly realizing that we humans are not necessarily the pinnacle of evolution. Octopuses, for example, represent an alternative branch of the evolutionary tree. What is sex like for an animal whose arms contain a brain and can operate almost independently of each other? You’ll understand why Japanese artist Hokusai created that memorable image of interspecies sex between a human and an octopus with those searching, piercing tentacles. But there is a terrible mortality rate when having sex with cephalopods. Female octopuses exhibit semelparity: that is, they can mate with many males, but die after a single pregnancy.
Cuttlefish also exhibit strange postures, as scientist Peter Godfrey-Smith describes in his beautifully uninhibited book on cephalopods, Other Minds. In a “revolving, uncomplicated and purposeful” choreography, “like a dance from the court of a civilized French king,” they mate head to head, and after a few moments of silence the male uses his left fourth arm to release a sperm to take. package and place it in a special container under the female’s beak.
The beach is another arena for such performances. Slippers (Crepidula fornicata) cling to each other in small towers of seven or more shells, gradually changing sex from the largest, oldest females at the bottom to the younger males at the top. When a female dies, a male changes sex and takes his place.
At the other end of the marine scale, walruses possess penis bones known as baculum, useful for easing the strain of intercourse when you weigh a ton and a half. Many mammals have this feature, but the walrus baculum is by far the largest at 60cm in length, a sort of penis counterpart to the formidable tusks that give them the majestic appearance of Arctic sex gods.
As Richard Sabin of the Natural History Museum, who showed me such a bone in the museum’s secret warehouses, explains, “the baculum allows the male walrus to be inserted long enough for the sperm to reach its target.” It is an important consideration if the female is half her weight.
When it comes to birds, things get weird, much to Tim Dee’s delight. Dee, author and inveterate observer of the stranger things in the bird world, tells me from his South African garden about the local ostriches, the males of which have an appendage rare among birds: a pseudo-penis that resembles ‘a limp piece of pink meat’. . He also notes that South African penguins “mate in front of their fellow penguins, who gather like a tutting audience, all gaping and disapproving at the same time.”
And yet, Dee adds, the strangest bird sex is to be found in Britain, in the form of dunnocks – “apparently harmless, even Victorian birds that sweetly peck at the bushes yet engage in kinky boots.”
“Males peck at the cloacas of females (the only opening birds use for both excretion and reproduction, also found in echidnas and platypuses) to induce them to expel a previous mate’s sperm before replacing it with his own. It is Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” says Dee, evoking the bizarre human mating scenes in Luis Buñel’s 1972 film.
Jim Wilson, a noted ornithologist and polar guide, also finds the details of duck sex remarkable – not least from the point of view of genital manipulation. To avoid unwanted attention from men with their large, corkscrew-shaped penises, female Muscovy ducks have evolved clockwise spiral vaginas, Wilson says, which are incompatible with the counterclockwise rotation of the male members when forced.
One of Wilson’s favorite stories is about the female red-necked phalarope – unusually brightly colored in a world where the males are usually the standout specimens. After mating and laying her eggs in Arctic breeding grounds, she leaves her mate to care for them and flies off to mate with at least one other male, perhaps more. It depends on her mood, I guess.
But let’s not forget that humans are animals too, and sex makes us more animalistic and transformative. There is a memorable scene in WG Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, in which the often emotionless writer, during a long coastal walk in Suffolk, looks from a cliff onto a distant beach below and sees a couple mating as one living organism, vibrating ‘like a kind of great the mollusk washed ashore… a single creature, a two-headed monster with many limbs that had drifted in from far out to sea, the last of a wondrous species.” When you look at it soberly, you have to admit that sex remains a decidedly unlikely arrangement, no matter what species you are.
• Albert & the Whale by Philip Hoare is published by 4th Estate.