About halfway through Disney’s 1994 animated movie The Lion King comes a scene of teenage love. It’s remarkably suggestive yet left unconsummated—on-screen, at least.
Simba and Nala, two lions who have been friends since cubhood, have reconnected after several years apart. Both are now firmly in post-pubertal, pre-adult wildhood. Simba sports a handsome mane; Nala has developed shapelier flanks and doe eyes. As Elton John’s lush ballad “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” swells across the soundscape, the two adolescent cats spend a day together frolicking in a waterfall, play-wrestling in a clearing, leaping through a field at sunset, and rolling down a hill in a tangle. Landing at the bottom, the pair find themselves on top of one another, and suddenly the playfulness is charged with an entirely different energy. Nala licks Simba on the cheek and then reclines on a bed of green grass, narrowing her eyes and lowering her chin as she peers up at her friend, and the two characters nuzzle.
The moment holds just long enough for any budding adolescent to start wondering what will happen next, but it’s interrupted by the meerkat Timon and his flatulent warthog friend, Pumbaa, singing a coda about how their friend trio is doomed now that Simba has a girlfriend. While the abrupt break is in keeping with the film’s “G” rating, adolescent sexual behavior that stops short of intercourse is not far off from what often happens in nature. In the wild, male and female adolescent lions may play-fight and court like Simba and Nala do in the movie, but they don’t always start reproducing right away. In other words, although they’re physically mature, they aren’t yet having sex.
The fact that wild animal adolescents who are physically developed aren’t necessarily sexually active is an important and surprising point. It may seem uniquely human, but it is observed across the animal kingdom. In some situations, as soon as an animal reaches puberty and has the biological capacity to reproduce, it does. But at other times, in species from fish to birds, reptiles to mammals, an animal’s first time may happen months, years, or even decades after it has completed puberty.
However, watch most nature films and you’ll be told a different story. The nature documentary, a genre invented and largely produced by mature men, has for decades been a primary source of information about wild animals for the general public. These entertaining, if misleading, portraits have reflected at least as much about the culture and characteristics of the humans behind the cameras as they have about the wild animals in front of them.
The films could be about giraffes, foxes, sloths, or sage hens, but they have typically featured a perspective in which eager-to-mate males pursue coy females who succumb to their charms. Or, in another version, all the males desperately compete with each another before a judgmental panel of females. In this case, the females usually all want the same thing—the strongest mate who is also the best protector and provider. No matter how many times they’re repeated, these classic tropes are simply incomplete and often inaccurate. So, too, is the common human insult that people who jump immediately into bed are “behaving like animals.”
Besides skewing toward the largely male perspectives of their creators, most nature films have also been adultocentric. Wild animals may be adult-sized and appear to be sexually active, but that doesn’t mean they are. More tentative, inexperienced, cringe-y adolescent sexuality has rarely been the focus of these programs. The celibate reality of many adolescent animals perhaps doesn’t make for the best TV.
The truth about adolescent sex in the wild is much more nuanced. Rarely in documentaries do you see adolescents being kept from mating by older, dominant group members, or young adults staying in the nest for a few seasons, passing up the chance to breed. You don’t see young adult female gorillas, already sexually mature and cycling normally, continuing to play as if they were juveniles, ignored by mature males as possible mates. You don’t see all the social practicing. The trying-on of roles. The testing of behaviors. You don’t see a lot of younger animals being unreceptive to—leery of—sex.
To be clear, wild animals are not making humanlike decisions about the timing of their first sexual activities. As far as we currently know, our species is unique in having the ability to consciously balance the pros and cons of sexual encounters navigating the webs of ambiguity around morality, religion, and cultural norms.
But while religion, ethics, and popular culture don’t influence the timing of first intercourse in animals, the environment surely does. Daylight and breeding season exert a strong effect on hormone production, leading to sexual readiness and desire. Availability of food and numbers of nearby predators contribute to when an adolescent animal becomes sexually active. During a season with little food or lots of predators, it may not make sense to use energy and incur the risks of having offspring who will likely not survive. A better strategy might be to wait. For example, by the age of about four, Antarctic fur seals are sexually mature, physically. However, if the fish and squid they eat are scarce or predatory orcas are especially abundant, the fur seals might not start breeding until they’re seven.
Even members of an animal’s community can exert a powerful influence on an individual’s emerging sexual life and opportunities. In many species, older dominants essentially force adolescents to be celibate. Through intimidating behaviors, dominant males and females can literally shut down the reproductive systems of subordinate adolescents and young adults—which delays sexual behavior (intercourse) for these otherwise reproductively mature animals. Being a subordinate is stressful, and higher levels of stress hormones seem to suppress fertility. Dominant female mammals from yellow baboons and meerkats to hamsters and mole rats intimidate subordinates, causing temporary infertility, implantation failures, and pregnancy loss. In wolf packs where only the dominant pair reproduces, pheromones in urine may block the sexual drive of subordinate females and males. The premier pair’s monopoly on breeding ensures more resources for their pregnancies and pups. In wild Bornean orangutans, only one male at a time has mating privileges, and only he develops the big cheek pouches characteristic of the dominant. The cheeks of adolescent males remain small until their status rises. After a ten-year puberty, male sperm whales finally become sexually mature around fifteen, but often aren’t sexually active until their twenties, their reproductive opportunities held in check by dominant males. For the same reason, and with similarly long life spans, male elephants too develop physically over a long puberty but don’t begin breeding until their late twenties, sometimes even thirties. Adolescent males with reproductive ability may want to mate—they sometimes try to. But their subordinate positions and social inexperience limit their opportunities.
READY OR NOT
The timing of an animal’s first sexual experience has tremendous consequences for its future. When the first time is delayed, individuals will be older, physically healthier, and socially smarter, and that in turn can make them better partners and better parents. Animals who have offspring too early often lack the know-how and resources to properly feed or forage. Born to parents not ready to care for them, these animal offspring frequently suffer or die. Fish who incubate eggs in their mouths, called mouthbrooders, for example, routinely swallow their first clutches. First-time sheep mothers take longer to accept their lambs. The offspring of inexperienced brown bear and gorilla mothers are at increased risk of dying. In one study, first-time snow monkey mothers abandoned 40 percent of their infants.
An early-breeding, inexperienced female may find both her offspring and herself struggling to survive. Pregnancy in a still-small adolescent can be physically dangerous for both her and her baby. For young female mammals the physical burden of lactation can be additionally challenging. Young mandrill mothers have infants that develop more slowly; infants born to young mother marmosets and rhesus monkeys are smaller, and their mothers make less milk; and the firstborns of young mother savannah baboons weigh less than offspring of older mothers.
This tracks with the human experience: “[A]cross human societies, adverse pregnancy outcomes are greater in mothers under 15,” reported Margaret Stanton in Current Anthropology. The World Health Organization reports that children of teen mothers are more likely to be born prematurely and at low birth weight, which is associated with compromised health later in life. They’re more likely to die in infancy and face challenges including blindness and deafness, cerebral palsy, and intellectual disability. They are far more likely to live in poverty and repeat the pattern of early pregnancy than the children of older mothers. For the mothers themselves, early pregnancy can be devastating. According to WHO, the leading cause of death worldwide for girls ages fifteen to nineteen is pregnancy-related complications.
The low social status of most human and animal adolescents and young adults means that a reproducing adolescent couple may find themselves forced to live on the less desirable edges of more dangerous territories. Low-ranking adolescent and young adult bird parents may be forced to build their nests and raise their young in low-quality outlying areas with harder-to-obtain food and more predators. The first clutch of eggs a bird parent produces, particularly if the parents are very young, are at higher risk of predation from the moment they’re laid, because the new parents have less experience warding off predators.
Psychosocial dangers of too-early sexual experiences are also seen in many animals. Horse breeders know that stallions and mares who are mated when they’re not socially ready can have lifelong trauma around sexual function. Premature sexual experiences for yearling or younger colts can irrevocably alter the temperament of the stallion that colt becomes, especially if those early experiences are with a “mean mare.” With their tail-swishing and squealing, physically aggressive mean mares can damage the emerging sexual function of an inexperienced young male. As young stallions get older and more experienced around mares, this danger decreases.
In the world of horse breeding, humans are making decisions about when an animal is ready for intercourse. In our species, every individual should have complete control over their own sexuality and expression. But, tragically, this is often not the case. Among adolescents around the world, coercive first sexual experiences are alarmingly common. The negative consequences for both female and male adolescent victims are significant and enduring. Depression, self-injury, and substance abuse are common. And, compounding the damage, academic challenges often emerge in victimized adolescents, which place them at risk for further hardship.
The risks of early pregnancy and the benefits of waiting have become increasingly well known. Over the past twenty years, in many parts of the world, human teen pregnancies and births have been steadily declining. In wealthier modern human societies, delaying childbirth reflects efforts to maximize future safety and opportunities for offspring. Greater parental resources—material, social, educational—accrued over time may provide offspring with greater access to jobs, housing, and health care.
Today, many human adolescents and young adults are waiting to have sex for a reason having nothing to do with forestalling pregnancy. According to a Harvard study that surveyed some three thousand adolescents around the United States, more students are graduating from high school as virgins than at any time over the past twenty-five to thirty years. While other factors may be impacting teen sexual activity, such as economics and novel social interactions emerging out of digital technologies, this particular research indicated that students may be delaying relationships in order to protect themselves emotionally. They’re afraid of getting hurt.
Waiting periods serve another crucial function. In the weeks, months, or years between developing their reproductive capability and actually mating, young animals are getting educated. Socially and romantically educated—in the courtship cultures and traditions of their particular species.
The field truck took a sharp right turn and we bumped up a rutted incline before stopping atop a small hill. Spread below us was an expanse of rolling green, hazed with yellow wildflowers. The small valley held a lake, and around the edges of it milled a herd of Milu deer, a species we’d never heard of until observing them in person, there at the Wilds, a ten-thousand-acre conservation and nature preserve a half hour from Columbus, Ohio.
Milu deer are native to China but extinct in the wild. The world’s largest known group of them resides at The Wilds, and has grown from fifteen individuals in 1995 to around sixty today. Pointing out across the lake, our veterinarian guide for the day explained how this herd had arranged itself for the afternoon.
Farthest away were three or four older adolescent males, slouching together on the shore. A little closer to where we were parked was a group of younger adolescents, their soft antler nubs just starting to grow. They raced in and out of the water, like middle schoolers at a pool party. Closer still was a mixed-age group of females, some lounging on the banks, flicking their ears, some dabbling in the water, some pregnant and some with babies nearby. Surveying the whole scene like a king, alone at the end of the lake nearest to us, was the herd’s dominant male.
Like all fully mature Milu males, he was crowned with an enormous antler rack with multiple points and thick branches, forming a giant basket over his head. His crown was so huge it was as if small but sturdy trees had erupted from the top of his skull. But even more marvelous than the antlers themselves was what the male had done to them. By dragging his head through the water and surrounding shore, he had festooned his rack with weeds, grass, and other vegetation. Dripping in festive, botanical ribbons from every point, tucked like birds’ nests in the notches, clumps of muddy leaves and merry wads of stems and stalks decorated his antlers. “Antler adorning,” as it’s called, is a common behavior of many South Asian deer.
No one really knows what, if any, biological benefit these remarkable decorations provide, but the more lavish the display, the more popular that Milu individual will be as a breeding partner. Like a peacock’s tail-flare, the spectacle of antler adorning seems to have no direct function, beyond signaling sexual availability—and, more important, social maturity—to potential mates.
We observed that antlers weren’t the only thing this male was employing to advertise his mature status. His body was a different color from those of the rest of the group. Where the females and younger males were a toasted-biscuit brown, this dominant was a dark chocolate. However, that wasn’t because his actual coat color was different. It was because he had covered himself in mud and his own urine—another aspect of Milu sexual signaling. We also learned that mature males make a characteristic vocalization called a bugle, and they do a distinct, swaggering head-waving movement to show off their decorated antlers.
The adolescents at the far end of the lake were on their way to this mature look, but they weren’t quite there yet. Their racks bore a few mossy fringes, but nothing like the baroque drapery of the single dominant male. They were still the biscuit color of their mothers and young siblings. They had gone through the physical changes of puberty—in body and antler-size, they rivaled the male. But still in wildhood, these adolescents didn’t yet have the cultural experience that makes an animal fully mature. As the summer wore on, they would get better and better at rack decorating, bugling, and mud/urine rolling. Eventually they would get strong and confident enough to challenge the dominant male for his position. But not yet. For now, they were hanging out in this gang at the far end of the lake, observing, waiting, practicing.
Bowerbirds, native to New Guinea and northern Australia, are legendary in ornithology circles for the elaborate nests that mature males build to attract mates. But, like whales learning to sing underwater and Milu deer adorning their antlers, bowerbirds don’t figure out how to build sturdy and attractive nests overnight. Adolescent and young adult bowerbirds observe master nest builders for a year or more. Hours spent watching, and more hours spent honing their own skills on practice bowers, plus, when the coast is clear, hours of practice on their mentors’ nest sites make for well-trained and desirable bowerbird mates. Like strategic apprentices, these males are smart enough to work hard, but savvy enough not to threaten any of the adults until they’re ready to take their jobs. While these male bowerbirds have the physical ability to reproduce by five or six, they often wait until they’re seven to develop their mature plumage. Delayed plumage maturation—like a form of avian redshirting—gives these adolescents and young adults time to grow stronger and more experienced while staying safe from attack by potentially jealous adult males. To be clear, the delay isn’t conscious; rather it happens automatically in response to certain environmental and social cues. Male bowerbirds who have extra years to learn and practice their unique courtship behavior are ultimately more successful at attracting females to their nests and mating.
LOVE ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE
For many thousands of years, Milu deer and bowerbirds have been signaling interest with the same basic behaviors. Human courtship behavior, by contrast, seems to change with every generation, adapting to economic pressures, cultural shifts, and new understandings of sexual wants and expectations. The dating landscape of modern adolescents and young adults in many ways looks nothing like that of their ancestors—even their most recent ones.
Jennifer Hirsch, a Columbia public health professor and author of Modern Loves, a cultural anthropology of marriage, writes that “around the world, young people are . . . deliberately positioning themselves in contrast to their parents and grandparents.” In her fieldwork, she found that from Mexico to Nigeria to Papua New Guinea, dating norms and courtship communication have shifted.
“In rural western Mexico, young couples walk hand in hand in the plaza or even dance together in the dark corners of the town disco, rather than courting as their parents had, in secret whispers through a chink in a stone wall,” writes Hirsch. She continues:
Among the Huli of Papua New Guinea, young spouses often live together, rather than in the separate men’s and women’s houses of the past, claiming that “family houses,” as they are called, are the “modern” and “Christian” way for loving couples to live. In Nigeria, although marriage is still very much regarded as a relationship that creates obligations between kin groups as well as between individuals, courtship at least has been transformed into a moment for young men and women to demonstrate their modern individuality.
An artwork created by a Plains warrior that was part of an exhibition at the Peabody in 2012 depicts a nineteenth-century Lakota custom for young men and women who wanted to communicate mutual interest. A standing couple, encircled by a large red blanket, hold their faces close. Only their heads peek over the top edge. Dashed lines run between their mouths to indicate conversation. The exhibit label explained that “when a young man wanted to court a woman, he tried to talk to her when she went to fetch water in the evening. If she were receptive, he would envelop her in a double-sized wool courting blanket.” With the huge blanket wrapped around them, creating a temporary structure, the couple could talk and assess one another’s interest, out of sight of their protective parents and the rest of the community.
The digitally enhanced twenty-first-century dating landscape might have some young adults longing for a courting blanket to give them some privacy, or at least clearer rules about how to start a romantic relationship. And while it’s true that elders have been hand-wringing about youth fads since at least ancient Greek times, and probably longer, it does feel as if we’re in a special period of sexual behavioral upheaval that has left adolescents uniquely ill-equipped to understand their own sexuality. It may feel that way, but there is a simpler way of understanding what has happened. What’s changed isn’t adolescent uncertainty about sex and adult concerns about adolescents’ having it. It’s that modern adults no longer know or teach their young the complex and honest communication that contributes to bringing animals together when they’re ready.
Teen life coach Cyndy Etler opined on CNN that sexual education ought to expand into the socio-behavioral in order to make adolescent young adults safer: “Teens say they want information about social, emotional, and behavioral topics, including what predatory behavior looks like. How to handle unwanted advances from people you know. How to broach these taboo subjects—as in, exactly what words to use.”
The psychologist Richard Weissbourd offers a different interpretation of the same message. He believes that many twenty-first-century adolescents and young adults are yearning for lessons about love. They want more guidance on how to start a relationship and how to end one, how to deal with breakups, and how to avoid getting hurt.
Weissbourd believes that simply talking more about healthy relationships could go a long way toward blunting the misogyny and gender-based degradation he calls “rampant” in current attitudes about sex. In his opinion, “relationships are something we all need to practice—hearts get broken, it might end badly, but we can learn from that. We can learn how to do it honestly and with kindness. And that prepares us for mature relationships as adults.”
One of the best ways for adolescents to do that, believes Weissbourd, is to hear stories about the give-and-take of relationships, including experiences with romantic kindness and heartbreak. Romantic role models can come from television and film, and from classic and contemporary novels. As the Australian writer Germaine Greer noted, “A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.”
In our species, books, films, and other media are an important part of social learning about sexuality. Observing Elizabeth Bennet and William Darcy balance their needs and desires with the expectations of their parents and community is a central thrill of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The story instructs whether you’re reading Austen’s words on the page or watching Keira Knightley and Matthew MacFadyen in the 2005 film adaptation. Its appeal even transcends its historical setting, as proven by the blockbuster success of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, an updated spin on the story that Renée Zellweger and Colin Firth (playing Mark Darcy) memorialized on-screen. The basics of courtship—balancing desire and uncertainty—continue through human culture even as clothing and hairstyles change.
Around the time of Salt’s sexual coming-of-age, some members of her horizontal tribe—that is to say, human adolescents—were devouring a book that explored many of the same experiences. Forever . . ., published by Judy Blume in 1975, tells the story of Katherine Danziger, an eighteen-year-old college-bound high school senior, and her first sexual experiences with Michael, a boy from her hometown. Forever . . . has become a YA classic, but like other stories that contain scenes of adolescent sexuality, from Stephenie Meyer’s vampire-themed Twilight series to Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, to John Green’s Looking for Alaska, Forever . . . is on the list of “Most Challenged Books” compiled by the American Library Association (ALA) since 1990. The ALA, a professional organization for librarians founded in 1876 that advocates for inclusion and intellectual freedom, reports that adolescent sexual content is by far the most common complaint they receive, outstripping violence, gambling, suicide, and Satanism as reasons people call for a book to be challenged.
What adolescents read and watch informs their understanding of many aspects of life, including sexuality. But it doesn’t necessarily determine their behavior, and that is a good thing. Every millennial who grew up watching Sex and the City isn’t consigned to choose a sexual future only as an uncertain Carrie, voracious Samantha, cold Miranda, or uptight Charlotte. Learning to make choices in a sexual realm can be enhanced by considering how sexuality is handled or fumbled by the characters met on pages and screens, and exposure to the larger world of human sexuality may help adolescents better understand their attractions and impulses.
But it’s important to note that in many animals, particularly in primates, social learning is extremely powerful, and what animal adolescents watch their peers doing influences them. Animal adolescents can’t read, but they do watch. They observe and learn when things go right and when they don’t. Moreover, early sexual experiences—those that happen in wildhood—echo throughout adult life, for humans and for other animals.
The sexual education of wild animals isn’t censored, but neither is graphic imagery as instantly and continuously available as it is for modern humans. Marketers of popular substances both legal and illegal have learned that it pays to make their products more potent and addictive. Just as marijuana farmers have succeeded in making cannabis two to five times stronger than it was in the 1980s, today’s pornography is more explicit, more available, and often more a part of adolescents’ lives than anyone could have imagined a generation ago. Exposure to sexuality is a part of most wild animal adolescence, but constant, streaming access to intense and exaggerated sexual imagery is not.
While wild adolescent animals obviously don’t watch movies or TV, they do have plenty of opportunity to see mating behavior. And it turns out that observing the best practices of in-the-know elders is a common way that younger animals learn not only about sexuality but about how to communicate desire and understand responses. Again, this is not just about observing the sex act. It’s about learning to understand how desire is expressed and returned.
THE MATING TREE
In the rain forests of Madagascar lives a carnivore called a fossa (pronounced “FOO-suh”). Put a round-eared teddy-bear face on a leopard’s lean body and imagine it twisting up a tree trunk with the agility of a snake, while chasing prey with the single-minded ferocity of a wolverine. That’s a fossa. And fossa courtship behaviors are as exotic and unusual as they are.
As described to us by Mia-Lana Lührs, a German evolutionary biologist, fossa communities designate certain tall trees as mating trees. Females looking for mating partners climb out onto branches of these special trees and start chanting courtship calls that carry throughout the forest. From far and wide come male fossas who climb up, indicating their willingness to mate. This Rapunzel-like scenario lacks a ladder made of magical hair, but it’s got a fairy-tale quality to it, with an eligible and interested female attracting nimble and enthusiastic males.
But the suitors who respond to the female’s courtship calls are not just males in their sexual prime. Notably, younger males arrive at the mating tree, too, and watch the older competitors clamoring to climb up. Lührs recalls a time she was sitting under a mating tree recording her observations during a particularly raucous session when two adolescent males raced up. They were very interested in the action of the older animals and zipped around the base of the tree, up and over Lührs and the chair in which she sat. They ran loops away from and then back toward the action. However, not once did either young male try to climb the tree. For fossa males, climbing the mating tree signals desire, and these two weren’t ready. Like sixth-graders at a dance or high schoolers at a nightclub, they watched but remained on the sidelines.
The mating tree isn’t just a place to have sex; it’s a place to learn about courtship. Fossa females also learn courtship from older members of their community. Lührs described a time she observed a mother and daughter arrive at the mating tree together. The daughter climbed up and started calling. Meanwhile, the mother waited on the ground and even took a nap. After a while, when no males responded, the daughter descended the tree and mother and daughter left together.
When we asked Lührs to hypothesize about a possible evolutionary or social reason why a fossa mother would escort her young adult daughter to and from the mating tree, she commented that the action seemed guided by “tradition, some social learning” transmitted from mother to daughter. From an evolutionary perspective, Lührs observed, fossa daughters could benefit from being introduced to the mating system by their mothers before an actual high-stakes mating moment. A first-time fossa might be physically safer and reproductively more successful if she had practiced her species’ ritual of call and response before having to do it for real.
Lührs added that if the mother is still breeding during her daughter’s last years of dependence, the young female may have an opportunity to watch how her mother navigates consent—communicating desire, assessing it in mates, deciding what to do next—so the young female may move into her own early sexual experiences better informed.
Adult competence with courtship strongly influences their offspring’s future behavior around sex. Adults can show adolescents what healthy and mature relationships look like.
FAR FROM THE MATING TREE
For fossas, wildhood can be a unique time of sexual fluidity. As females enter early adolescence around twelve months, their bodies and behaviors may transform to become more masculine. They sprout spiny appendages that resemble adult male genitalia. Female adolescent masculinization peaks between two and three years. Once they are mature adults, they generally resume looking and behaving as females. Male fossas can display the opposite: especially if they live and hunt alone, they sometimes physically present as female. Transient shifts between feminization and masculinization have been noted in other mammals, including spotted hyenas, moles, certain primates, as well as some birds and fish.
A special challenge arises for humans when adolescents’ sexual identities differ from those of their parents. Even the most supportive and empathetic adults may be ignorant about communicating desire within spectrums of sexuality unfamiliar to them. Andrew Solomon explores this particular parent-child disconnect in the introduction to Far from the Tree. Solomon writes,
Because of the transmission of identity from one generation to the next, most children share at least some traits with their parents. These are vertical identities. Attributes and values are passed down from parent to child across the generations not only through strands of DNA but also through shared cultural norms. Ethnicity, for example, is a vertical identity. . . . Often, however, someone has an inherent or acquired trait that is foreign to his or her parents and must therefore acquire identity from a peer group. This is a horizontal identity. . . . Being gay is a horizontal identity; most gay kids are born to straight parents, and while their sexuality is not determined by their peers, they learn gay identity by observing and participating in a culture outside the family.
Adolescents whose sexual identities differ from those of their parents may need to look outside the family to learn more about sexual expression. For gender-nonconforming and LGBTQIA adolescents, peers sharing similar sexualities and horizontal identities become an important source of information for one another.
Salt likely arrived at her first sexual encounter with some understanding of whale courtship behaviors, learned socially from her mother and other whales in their pod. As a calf swimming with her mom, she’d heard the yearly chorus of male humpbacks and seen how her mother responded. Salt may have felt the raucous exhilaration of a humpback courtship group (more on that in a moment) and had a preview of being the intensely desired female at the center of it.
From about age two to around ten, Salt would have gone through puberty and spent much of her time alone or with other adolescents. From albatrosses and penguins to elephants and otters, adolescent animals band together. They’re typically focused on perfecting foraging and hunting skills, and trying to stay safe from predators, like the killer whales that specialize in adolescent humpbacks or the leopard seals that go after king penguins. Any sexual activity that occurs in these groups of adolescents and young adults is usually not procreative.
For ten years or so, Salt likely heard male chorusing during the winter breeding season and felt no desire, and no need to respond. But one winter that changed.