Eliyanna Kaiser
ISSUE 1.3 (2005)
Just like the northern lights with which we are more familiar, the southern lights (aurora australis) dance furiously over our planet’s southernmost region, Antarctica. Perhaps they shine with a slightly red-tinted hue over Ross Island. Eight hundred miles away from the South Pole, this little island is home to the Adelie penguins, where scientists Dr. Fiona Hunter (Cambridge) and Dr. Lloyd Davis (University of Otago), have observed a zoological first: a monogamous bird species engaging in extramarital sex explicitly in return for material items.
That’s right: hooker penguins.
In the world of the Homo sapien, it is scarcity that creates the conditions for commercial prostitution. Prostitutes seek to acquire finite resources—money and goods—while clients seek increased access to willing sexual partners. It really shouldn’t be surprising that life in the rest of the animal kingdom isn’t so different.
Mating pairs of Adelies make their elaborate nests on a raised platform built from stones, where each female will lay two eggs per mating season. The structure keeps the eggs away from the ice and the freezing spring runoff. But the stones are hard to come by. The male penguins have to dive for the pebbles and bring them to shore one at a time, and without a sufficient number the chicks won’t hatch.
The researchers witnessed females, who were already paired, soliciting males for stones in exchange for sex. Often the penguin clients were so happy with this service that they allowed their girls to help themselves to more stones later.
Illustration by Cristy C. Road.
Hunter and Davis even observed some particularly sly penguin gals getting stones without putting out, just by going through the courtship ritual (lap dance, anyone?). One female teased sixty-two stones from a single male this way, without him getting any tail.
The researchers don’t think that the males are simply after sex for its own sake but that they are hoping to impregnate the female penguins. They also don’t believe that the females are solely after hard currency. There is a possible evolutionary advantage for them in this practice, since sex with multiple males helps ensure “genetic quality or variability.” Additionally, if their mate dies, they have already established a relationship (of sorts) with another male.
Hunter and Davis are planning another trip to Antarctica’s red-light district for further research.
ELIYANNA KAISER is a former executive editor of $pread magazine. She is currently raising her two children in Manhattan. In her spare time, she writes fiction.
CRISTY C. ROAD is a Cuban-American illustrator and writer. Road published a zine, Greenzine, for ten years, and has released three novels tackling queerness, mental health, cultural identity, and punk. Her most recent work, Spit and Passion, is a graphic coming-out memoir (about Green Day). She’s currently working on a tarot card deck, and her punk rock band The Homewreckers. Road hibernates in Brooklyn.