Macaque Monkeys Frequently Have Gay Sex
Nature Ecology and Evolution on July 10.The authors found that, of a group of 236 rhesus macaques, 72 percent of the males engaged in same-sex mounting with other males, compared to 46 percent that attempted to mount females."We looked at around 250 males, and 72 percent of those engaged in same-sex mounting.
Most of them were bisexual," Vincent Savolainen told Newsweek. He is co-author of the paper and director of the Georgina Mace Centre for the Living Planet at Imperial College London.In the paper, the authors describe how they studied these 236 males within a colony of 1,700 rhesus macaques living in the wild on the island of Cayo Santiago in Puerto Rico, and recorded all attempts at sexual mounting.
They found that the males that had sexual contact with each other were more likely to back each other up in conflicts, showing that SSB was strongly correlated with 'coalitionary bonds'."[This behavior was] more common in males in rhesus macaques, [but] in another related species, the Japanese macaques, same-sex sexual behavior is more common in females," Savolainen said.There is a wide range of other species that have been seen to copulate with members of the same sex, from albatrosses and dolphins to bisons and walruses.
One study on giraffes found that up to 94 percent of observed mounting incidents were between two males.The authors also found that this SSB was passed on from generation to generation, as pedigree data revealed that the behavior was 6.4 percent heritable.
