Torrid encounters

Two male octopuses have sex and the scientific world scrambles for an explanation. But what if queerness is ancestral and needs no justification?

In 1993, researchers were operating a deep-sea vehicle in the Pacific ocean when, for the very first time, they observed and filmed two deep-sea octopuses having sex. The sex was between two males, of different species and it was penetrative.

Immediately the scientific world scrambled to find an explanation for this unexpected behaviour. But this need to explain (away) same-sex sexuality tells us more about cultural bias than it does about deep-sea octopuses.

What if queerness (or same-sex sexuality among octopuses) never needs explaining? What if, far from being an aberration that has somehow reappeared thousands of times throughout the animal world, same-sex sexuality is ancestral?

“The small male subsequently succeeded in introducing the distal end of his hectocotylus into the mantle cavity of the large male, an act constituting copulation in octopodids.” Yes, this is an erotic spoken-word performance waiting to happen.

One explanation forwarded in the Nature paper about this research - imaginatively called ‘Close encounter in the deep’ - is that there is a low availability of partners in the vastness of the deep sea and the animals don’t live long.

“In such environments, males may … modify their behaviour to increase the time, energy and possibly gametes invested in each encounter with another octopod rather than to leave opportunities for reproduction unexplored.”

I think we can go ahead and call this the horny octopus hypothesis.

Another explanation, not explicit in this paper, but very common nonetheless is that same-sex sexuality is a failed attempt at mating. Maybe they’re just not very smart. We could call this the confused octopus hypothesis.

According to a New Scientist article, with the even less objective title, ‘Torrid sex scenes puzzle octopus experts’: “The researchers are open to alternative theories. ‘If anybody can come up with a good idea … they should feel free to give me a call’”.

I personally find this attempt to crowd-source scientific hypotheses from the public to be fascinating and perhaps just a little desperate. I assume that if the first sexual behaviour of deep-sea octopuses observed by researchers was a male octopus penetrating a female octopus, that would have been the end of the story. This need to explain (away) same-sex sexual behaviour borders almost on the compulsive.

Maladaptive or adaptive?

Both what I’m playfully calling the ‘confused octopus’ and the ‘horny octopus’ hypotheses are examples of maladaptive explanations in which same-sex behaviour is seen as a mistake.

Either the octopuses were having male-male penetrative sex because of mistaken identity, or it was the by-product of an adaptive trait, in this case curiosity and “high sexual responsiveness” which helpfully led the octopuses to “thoroughly investigate the possibilities, regardless of species or gender.”

Some other hypotheses that regard same-sex sexual behaviour as a mistake are that it results from:

• limited availability of other-sex partners (known commonly as ‘the prison effect’. It’s stories all the way down)

• infection with an external agent such as a virus

• the maladaptation of imperfect organisms

• sexual frustration after refusal by other-sex partners

There are plenty of adaptive explanations as well, including that same-sex behaviour helps maintain positive social relationships, resolves and reduces conflict, provides resources to siblings, helps balance population growth and on and on.

Whether queer sex is seen as a mistake or as something useful to (straight-majority) society speaks volumes about the observer and there are always assumptions at play.

Queer Ancestors

An image from Monk et al, 2019. On the left, the dominant paradigm - species were always exclusively straight (blue) until other sexualities arose. On the right, species are ancestrally ‘indiscriminate’ (yellow) and exclusive sexualities emerge later.

In 2019, another Nature paper was released that still to this day has me gripped by its premise. The authors of the paper, and a more accessible article on the same topic called ‘Why Is Same-Sex Sexual Behavior So Common in Animals?’ question some of the assumptions behind attempts to explain away same-sex sexuality and suggest that they are “perhaps rooted more in cultural norms than in scientific rigor.”

One dominant, often unspoken, assumption is that the ancestral baseline condition for animals is heterosexuality. From this baseline, so the story goes, same-sex sexual behaviour (SSB) evolved again and again, in thousands of species, from common toads to snow geese, from Japanese macaques to deep-sea octopuses.

But, as the authors point out: “If any other trait had been observed in such a diverse array of taxa…it likely would be widely accepted that the trait was an ancestral condition present in some of the earliest animal clades.

The notion that SSB has arisen convergently in so many different lineages only makes intuitive sense from a heteronormative world view in which ‘heterosexual’ behaviour is framed as the ‘natural order’ for sexually reproducing species, and ‘homosexuality’ is viewed as a recent aberration whose existence must be explained and justified.”

I’m still reeling from the implications.

What if deep-sea octopuses have their own reasons (which we might never understand)?

What if sexual behaviour is much messier than the binary, heteronormative stories we’ve been told?

What if we were queer first and never needed any explanation?

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Dear friends,

Thank you for being here and for engaging with my queer ecology writing! If you’re new to my work, you can read more on my website or newsletter. If you’re enjoying these essays, please consider supporting me on Patreon or with some delicious coffee ☕️.

You can hear this story among many others on the Queering Nature tour at the Berlin Natural History museum.

love, Kes 🩷

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