The disgusting sex life of the Adélie penguin

I’m writing a series of lectures to deliver when I’m a guest speaker on two Antarctic cruises this October and November. One of my talks will be on Scott’s Terra Nova expedition of 1910-1913, in which Scott and his crew, arriving in Antarctica aboard the eponymous ship, attempted to reach the South Pole. Scott actually made it along with four of his men, only to find that Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian team had beat him to the Pole by a little over a month. What a bummer it was for them to see the Norwegian flag flying over their destination!

And, as you may know, all five of Scott’s team died on the way back: one from a concussion, one (Titus Oates), suffering from severe frostbite, walking to his death in a blizzard so he wouldn’t slow the other three, and then the last three, including Scott, freezing to death in their tent—only 11 miles from a cache of food that they couldn’t reach in the blizzard conditions.

One of the reasons Amundsen may have beaten Scott is because a major part of the Terra Nova expedition was to do science, which might have slowed them down. (Scott’s group, for example, dragged 30 pounds of Glossopteris fossils behind them on the way back from the Pole.) Scott’s group was constituted and instructed to make observations on zoology, geology, weather, ice movement, paleontology, and, of course, to collect specimens.

My talk will be on the science of the Terra Nova expedition, with an emphasis on evolutionary biology. Two of the aims, for example, were connected with evolution: collecting fossils (and they found some of the first evidence that Antarctica was once part of the large continent of Gondwanaland), and to determine, by looking at Emperor Penguin eggs, whether birds really were descended from reptiles. Getting the eggs, which ultimately failed to produce the kind of evidence they wanted, involved a horrendous journey to a breeding colony during the dark Antarctic winter. It was so cold that the men’s teeth froze and shattered. That story is a major part of the best book about the expedition, Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World (he’s referring to the Penguin Expedition, though it could also refer to Scott’s dash to the pole.)

Not mentioned in this book, but something I found in my researches, was that some of the important knowledge gleaned by the 12 scientists on Scott’s voyage never saw the light of day—at least until 2012.

The physician George Murray Levick, looking for observations to make, decided to spend twelve weeks observing the very large colony of Adélie Penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae) on Cape Adare. This location is (or was) the largest breeding colony of these animals in the world, harboring several hundred thousand individuals. Here’s the location and a picture of the colony.

And here’s Levick with one of these delightful birds, which, as you’ll see, he didn’t find so delightful:

Levick filled two notebooks with his observations, and, when he returned to England, published two books on penguins, Antarctic Penguins—A Study of Their Social Habits, and the more technical Natural History of the Adélie Penguin. But he left out an important aspect of Adélie biology—their sexual habits.

What Levick found was that Adélies practiced all kinds of sexual behaviors that he found disgusting. They forcibly copulated with dead females, with chicks and their own offspring, and males bonked other males as well as living but resistant females. They also practiced autoerotic behavior, with males sometimes ejaculating spontaneously onto the ice.

Steeped in Victorian mores, Levick saw these as no different from human pedophilia, necrophilia, masturbation, homosexuality, and rape. And so, though he recorded all these behaviors in his notebooks, he never published them, except in a four-page pamphlet that was circulated privately, and in only 100 copies.

I found the whole story in this paper from Polar Record, which reproduces Levick’s pamphlet at the end (I’ve put it below; it’s short). Click on the screenshot to read the paper, which is short and very interesting! Scroll down at the end to see a video of Adélies.

 

Here’s one of Levick’s notebooks, which includes photos. But it also includes some notes in English transliterated into the Greek alphabet!

Here’s an example from the notebook, where he suddenly lapses into transliterated Greek (not translated, but simply English words written using the Greek alphabet):

Apparently what shocked him the most was seeing a penguin try to copulate with a dead individual of its own species. Here, taken from the paper above, is an example of the transliteration. If you know the Greek alphabet, you can read the Greek into English.

Now it’s not clear exactly why Levick lapsed into Greek; perhaps he didn’t want people going through his notebooks to read the English (sometimes he pasted the Greek transliteration over notes in English), and if you saw just the Greek you would assume it was real Greek and ignore it.

Levick was especially upset by the behavior of bachelor males, which he called “Hooligan Cocks” (“cocks” are males, not penises). Here’s a passage from his second published book, drawing a veil over the penguins’ behavior (my emphasis):

Many of the colonies, especially those nearer the water, are plagued by little knots of ‘hooligans’ who hang about their outskirts, and should a chick go astray it stands a good chance of losing its life at their hands. The crimes which they commit are such as to find no place in this book, but it is interesting indeed to note that, when nature intends them to find employment, these birds, like men, degenerate in idleness (Levick 1914: 97–98).

And this is what he wrote in his notebook after he saw males repeatedly try to copulate with a hen who, temporarily paralyzed with cold, was crawling towards her nest:

There seems to be no crime too low for these Penguins.

By assuming that penguin behavior evinced the same kind of immorality as humans engaged in “similar” acts, Levick was too embarrassed to publish these observations. In fact, though they all turned out to be correct, they weren’t replicated until David Ainley observed them in the 1960s and 1970s.  (Ainley even did an experiment, showing that males would try to copulate with just the frozen head of a penguin.) Thus, the anthropomorphizing of penguin behavior delayed the progress of penguin science for half a century.

Here’s the pamphlet that Levick kept from public view (click to enlarge), a document recovered and reprinted by Russell et al.

To lighten your mood after all that sexual misbehavior, here’s a video showing Adélies. They are not criminals!