One third of L;eysan albatrosses in female-female pairs

[eridani]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-love-that-darent-squawk-its-name-when-animals-come-out-of-the-closet-1957085.html

Speaking on Oahu a few years ago as First Lady of the United States, Laura Bush – the wife of George W – praised Laysan albatross couples for making lifelong commitments to one another. But Lindsay C Young, a biologist who studies the Kaena Point colony, told me: "They were supposed to be icons of monogamy: one male and one female. But I wouldn't assume that what you're looking at is a male and a female."


Young has been researching the albatrosses on Oahu since 2003; the colony was the focus of her doctoral dissertation at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, which she completed last spring. (She now works on conservation projects as a biologist for hire.) In the course of her doctoral work, Young and a colleague discovered, almost incidentally, that a third of the pairs at Kaena Point actually consisted of two female birds, not one male and one female. Laysan albatrosses are one of countless species in which the two sexes look basically identical.

It turned out that many of the female-female pairs, at Kaena Point and at a colony that Young's colleague studied on Kauai, had been together for four, eight or even 19 years – as far back as the biologists' data went, in some cases. The female-female pairs had been incubating eggs together, rearing chicks and just generally passing under everybody's nose for what you might call "straight" couples.

Young would never use the phrase "straight couples". And she is adamantly against calling the other birds "lesbians" too. For one thing, the same-sex pairs appear to do everything male-female pairs do except have sex, and Young isn't really sure, or comfortable judging, whether that technically qualifies them as lesbians or not. But
moreover, the whole question is meaningless to her; it has nothing to do with her research. "'Lesbian,"' she told me, "is a human term."

[WildClarySage]

1. Lesbatrosses!

(Steven Colbert did a bit about this story. That was his word, lol can't take the credit.)

[WillParkinson]

2. Does everything male-female pairs do, except have sex...

So sex is the defining reason for the gay and lesbian appellation?

[eridani]

3. I think the researcher specifically wants to apply terms like "lesbian"

--only to human beings.

[WillParkinson]

4. I know, and I don't disagree...

It just sounded weird the way it was worded and I'd been up all day so was just a weeee bit cranky.