Seals found sexually assaulting penguins
The first time marine biologist William Haddad and his team saw a seal rape a penguin, they were shocked.
By the fourth time, they were convinced this bizarre behavior was becoming a trend.
For 50 years, researchers from the marine mammal program at the University of Pretoria in South Africa have been taking weekly censuses of the elephant seal population on sub-Antarctic Marion Island, more than a thousand miles south of Cape Town in the Indian Ocean. In 2006, they saw something they'd never seen before. A fur seal (not the species they were studying) mounted and appeared to mate with a king penguin.
They published a paper about the odd finding in 2008.
Then in happened again in 2009. And again in 2011, and once more in 2012.
"For the past 50 years, there have been people once a week on the beaches and this had never been seen. We said, 'This is strange. Why is this happening more often now?' So we decided to write a paper and come up with a hypothesis," Haddad told CBS News.
Haddad explained that it's not out of the ordinary to see a bull of one species of seal courting the female of another species and herding her into his harem. It's even possible that a seal might to try to reproduce with a sea lion. But this was something different entirely.
"This is very weird because it's hair and feathers, mammals and birds," he said. "It's such a big gap, it's unheard of."
In all four cases of what Haddad and his collaborators call sexual coercion, a seal chased, captured and mounted a penguin of unknown sex, then attempted to copulate with it "several times with periods of rest in between."
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
The first time marine biologist William Haddad and his team saw a seal rape a penguin, they were shocked.
By the fourth time, they were convinced this bizarre behavior was becoming a trend.
For 50 years, researchers from the marine mammal program at the University of Pretoria in South Africa have been taking weekly censuses of the elephant seal population on sub-Antarctic Marion Island, more than a thousand miles south of Cape Town in the Indian Ocean. In 2006, they saw something they'd never seen before. A fur seal (not the species they were studying) mounted and appeared to mate with a king penguin.
They published a paper about the odd finding in 2008.
Then in happened again in 2009. And again in 2011, and once more in 2012.
"For the past 50 years, there have been people once a week on the beaches and this had never been seen. We said, 'This is strange. Why is this happening more often now?' So we decided to write a paper and come up with a hypothesis," Haddad told CBS News.
Haddad explained that it's not out of the ordinary to see a bull of one species of seal courting the female of another species and herding her into his harem. It's even possible that a seal might to try to reproduce with a sea lion. But this was something different entirely.
"This is very weird because it's hair and feathers, mammals and birds," he said. "It's such a big gap, it's unheard of."
In all four cases of what Haddad and his collaborators call sexual coercion, a seal chased, captured and mounted a penguin of unknown sex, then attempted to copulate with it "several times with periods of rest in between."
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
Comment