What a bizarrely random incident: a fur seal tried to have sex with a penguin.
The 100kg seal first subdued the 15kg penguin by lying on it.
The penguin flapped its flippers and attempted to stand and escape - but to no avail.The seal may have been frustrated in its attempts to find a partner
The seal then alternated between resting on the penguin, and thrusting its pelvis, trying to insert itself, unsuccessfully.After 45 minutes the seal gave up, swam into the water and then completely ignored the bird it had just assaulted, the scientists report.
There are pictures. The seal was no doubt ignoring the penguin afterwards out of shame.
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It sucks not having hands.
Wait. That's not how it's done...?
Yeah, well, it's because evolutionary theory tells everything that they evolved from the same ancestor anyhow, so seals think they can screw penguins.
There will sooon be a Jack Chick comic about it.
Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
And these people were just sitting there watch a penguin getting raped? What the hell?
mating: ur doing it rong
Alex said:
And these people were just sitting there watch a penguin getting raped? What the hell?
I imagine they didn't want to get close enough for the seal to think they might work better than the penguin.
That's because it ate the sweet potato.
Haven't you ever heard that song by Loverboy?
Doot doo doo, seal and penguin DNA...just won't splice!
/Chef
My fave of the photos is the penguin smoking a cigarette afterwards. Looks like a Lucky Strike.
Great, now the next time I read PZ writing about how great seals are I'm going to be thinking to myself the last time any of my co-Pharyngulites saw a seal it was trying to fuck a penguin.
And then I'm going to imagine Nazi Stalinists while "Quinn the Eskimo" plays ironically in the background.
this makes so much sense all of a sudden.
i used to date this seal, and she was *always* insisting i wear a tuxedo. why didn't i ever make the connection?
eventually she left me on an ice-floe. she said something about my unwillingness to incubate eggs on my feet.
i'm not saying i'm bitter, but, you know how sometimes you just feel used?
Birds pretty regularly engage in interspecies sex, but it is usually with other birds.
The results are sometimes quite pretty.
I think we have a new model of the origins of taxa above the species level.
Gives rise to a new meaning for a blown seal.
Maybe the seal was trying to have evolved young by cross-breeding.
And finally, can this be considered bestiality?
*gallop* *gallop* *gallop*
Sorry to thread-jack but... the intelligent design bills died in the Florida legislature!
I hope this will stop those damn treehuggers whining everytime the see a coupla orca(s?) playing seal-pong.
It was not either rape, the slutty penguin was just begging for it by wearing that sexy outfit!
Uh oh, if the creationists see this Flash BBC News Science and Nature Bulletin, they'll realize we all just got our new orders from Evolution now.
Must ... obey ... evolution .. find ...penguin.
Maybe I'll be allowed to compromise with a nice guy in a tuxedo.
If I'm every being raped by a seal, put down the camera and HELP ME!
It's not terribly surprising. Have you ever been around a young male dog that hasn't been snipped? They'll hump anything.
Looks like that seal is going home with its trusty right flipper tonight!
Was it a male or female penguin? It will make all the difference in dog's eyes. Maybe it was a cross dressing seal or transgender penguin. And just asking for it.
"If I'm every being raped by a seal, put down the camera and HELP ME!"
And if I'm ever seen raping a penguin, stop the tape and just go away. I want some privacy.
Don't you see? This is just the natural result of our tolerance for those gay penguins! The slippery slope is real! It's just a matter of time now until civilized society collapses upon itself.
OT
The Florida House and Senate legislative sessions have ended with NO ACADEMIC FREEDOM BILL.
Florida Citizens For Science
#12 - There is a bunch of these kind of ducks (different colors) at a local Golf Course.
I will never be able to watch the seal scene in Happy Feet the same way again.
Starbix
"Don't Panic." -Douglas Adams
That's nothing; ever seen a high school age Brownian? Although in that case, the penguin would have been saying, "I'm sorry, but I don't think of you in that way. We're just friends." And the seal's friends would all be making fun of him. But the seal will show them all, yes he will. One day, when the seal is rich and famous and married to a hot flamingo with flawless skin and a Nobel prize in literature, all the penguins will be trying to add him as a friend on Facebook, but he'll totally not click 'confirm' and they'll be sorry.
No one here raised on a farm? I've seen dogs humping cats and dogs and cats hump chickens. Rams that mounted - well you don't want to know. The funniest interspecies romp I've witnessed took place at a wildlife park where a native white tail buck tried to mount a rhino, while an armadillo nonchalantly foraged a few feet away. That image beat the masturbating babboons who broke off our radio antenna before we exited the park.
Crap. Now I can't get the phrase "Magnum Opus" out of my head.
So you've been to Yankee Stadium?
This is the seal version of "choking the chicken"
apparently.
Wonder if that seal was in the DC Madam's black book?
Aristotle thought that the ostrich was the result of the mating between a gnat and a giraffe :)
In the seal's defense, did you see the pooper on that penguin?
Damn, I'd hit it.
At my house, we call that Friday.
My best friend had a young female cat who regularly tried to hump the male dog. Nature...she so scary.
I see an IG Nobel Prize coming for those guys! And being a young single guy I am used to interspecies intercourse, no, not a mule (that was in my teenage years) but "cougars" in some lonely Friday nights :)
That seal tried to "p-p-pick up a penguin"!
I'm sorry, I'm going now.
Talking of Ignobel prizes, I think that the 2003 entry for Biology on "The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the
mallard Anas platyrhynchos (Aves: Anatidae)", is appropriate here.
http://www.nmr.nl/nmr/binary/retrieveFile?instanceid=16&itemid=2574&sty…
An Alaskan truck driver was driving his big-rig through a raging winter snowstorm when his truck broke down near Anchorage. He radioed for a tow truck, bundled himself up in heavy winter gear, then went out into the storm to see if he could find what was wrong with his rig. He was quickly plastered with windblown snow; even his beard was heavily crusted with ice. Soon a tow truck with its mechanic arrived and he began his inspection. Crawling from underneath the truck, the mechanic turned to the truck driver and said, "It looks like you blew a seal." The truck driver replied, "No, this is just rime ice from the storm."
"After 45 minutes the seal gave up, swam into the water and then completely ignored the bird ..."
Geez, typical guy. Not even a hug or a little snuggling afterwards. Bet he didn't even call her again.
OT -
More evidence for PZ's law: "The more pious a person appears in public the more likely they are to be corrupt in private."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080502/ap_on_re_us/oral_roberts_scandal
Maybe it was a Monk seal...
If ever there was an appropriate time to play Barry White in accompaniment...
How soon before fundies claim Antarctic ice sheet melt is god's punishment for this interspecies fornication?
O.o Wow, George Carlin was right. Rape can be funny, given the right circumstances.
Speaking about unspeakable acts, it looks like Stein will be on Olbermann's Worst Person in the World.
Just wait for the Youtube "Bunny pwns cat" videos to arrive in your mailbox, PZ.
Hey, that was one hot chick.
Man, that would have been a rough partuition.
So does this mean interspecies sexual activity can no longer be labeled "unnatural"?
This is the price we pay for "And Tango Makes Three."
WHY DOES THIS ARTICLE CLAIM THAT THIS IS THE STRANGEST INTERSPECIES MATING EVER WITNESSED? A LITTLE DOG HUMPING YOUR LEG IS MUCH MORE RIDICULOUS PURSUIT. SEALS EAT PENGUINS. DOGS BITE HUMANS. SEX, SEX, SEX.
"The penguin did not appear to have been injured by the seal, the scientists report."
Only mentally scarred for life.
It's not uncommon, actually.
the harbor seals used to try and copulate with divers in Monterey (I can say this from personal experience), Sea Otters have been known to violently rape seal pups, etc.
haven't you ever had a dog try and hump your leg?
whatever. doesn't really seem like news to me.
http://thebuttsakk.com/otters.aspx
oh, and then there's of course Ham and his piglets...
...and this guy.
I worked at a veterinary hospital when this story came out. We left copies of every news brief on the horse doctors desk, and with great glee I wrote on them - See doc, the horse finally got someboby back!
http://www.komotv.com/news/archive/4158101.html
Patricia, from your linked article:
ah, NOW I know why the Discovery Institute located itself in Washington.
In one of the follow up reports it stated that the police would have to review over 100 video tapes of the farm sex... we all about wet ourselves laughing at that.
The sad part is that when the man's pal's figured out that we was actually going to die - they drove him to the hospital, dumped him out and fled. Great friends those.
... what, nobody's yet drawn a parallel Microsoft-Steve Ballmer / Linux penguin analogy?
Wow, this is really fascinating. As somebody whose primary field of interest is psychology, I'm always intrigued by direct observational evidence of behavioural similarities between humans and other animals.
Certainly we should expect similarities in psychology, due both to common ancestry and to convergent evolution (brains are generally pretty good for certain jobs), but the human aptitude for recursive cognition (thinking about thinking, talking about talking, analysing methods of analysis, and so on) complicates the symmetries by way of elaboration - we take a lot of top-down similar architecture and blow it up to do all sorts of interesting things.
If nothing else, this is one more nail in the coffin of the antique and dilapidated notion that humans are fundamentally distinct from ill-defined "nature", or the oft-related derivative claim that animals aren't people too.
Great friends those.
ten bucks says they self-identify as xians.
There was the report in, IIRC, Marine Mammal Science sometime in the 1990s about a rehabilitated male sea otter released at San Nicholas Island. They had a rather long list of species that the otter had used as convenient mates, including several where one would expect that the unwilling recipients of the otter's advances were actually larger than he was.
Patricia C. @ 59
Now I've got Spinal Tap running through my head.
There was the report in, IIRC, Marine Mammal Science sometime in the 1990s about a rehabilitated male sea otter released at San Nicholas Island.
yup. not just recorded once, but several times by different individuals, too.
The incidents were alluded to in the article I linked to.
ah, good 'ol uncle Milty (my very first ichthyology prof., and the one that got me started on my thesis). I've often thought he would have been as good a stand-up comedian as he was an ichthyologist (and teacher, btw).
oh, I should also mention that the otter-perp mentioned was "rehabilitated" at the Monterey Bay Aquarium program, which soon afterwards was "rehabilitated" itself.
It hasn't happened since, AFAIK, and the thinking was that it was due to improper rehabilitation and handling methods used early on in the program.
Senator Robert J. Furseal, R-Alaska, chair of the Senate Committee on Parks and Wildlife, flatly denies the event ever took place.
"From beginning to end," said the Senator at a hastily called press conference in Juneau, "this entire story is a shameless witch-hunt originated by eco-terrorists and supported by the Democrats in an election year for obvious political reasons. I was, in fact, touring Africa during the incident in question, and as we all know, there are no penguins in Africa. Outside a zoo, I doubt I have ever actually seen a live penguin."
No stranger to controversy, Sen. Furseal is simultaneously a staunch member of the Alaska's Russian Orthodox community and the first openly pinniped member of Congress.
lol
nice late nighter, hank!
PZ,
Speaking of interspecies rape, when are we going to hear about your debate with Angus Menuge?
This is an interesting case, after the snickering stops. I didn't follow up on it, but I always wondered what happened to the poor animals? Did the Washington State officials make bestiality illegal? Who showed up at the guys funeral - and a bit sick of me, what does it say on his death certificate & tombstone? The video tapes, ugh, don't want to know.
If an instinctive behavior doesn't get released by normal stimuli (due to lack of such normal stimuli, e.g. lack of mates), then the threshold for eliciting such behavior drops--and keeps dropping til the behavior can occur. Thus, the lonely seal turns to a penguin; the outcast moose tries to make up to a cow. As a friend once said, "Even the women in the office are starting to look good." A pigeon kept in isolation will eventually address courting displays to a visual irregularity, e.g. a spot on the floor.
So, the penguin wasn't a pinnipedophile.
@ jsn #29
"No one here raised on a farm? I've seen dogs humping cats and dogs and cats hump chickens. Rams that mounted - well you don't want to know. "
lmao. This sounds almost exactly like a quote from Dwight Schrute from The Office after someone made an interspecies sex cartoon.
"I grew up on a farm. I have seen animals having sex in every position imaginable. Goat on chicken. Chicken on goat. Couple of chickens doing a goat, couple of pigs watching. Whoever did this watermark got it exactly right."
Sorry to inform you you sound like Dwight Schrute.
Speaking of interspecies rape just saw Olbermann tear Ben Stein a new one in Worst Person in the World. Olbermann mentioned how Ben Stein thought PZ's comments reminded him of Nazis. Hope to see it posted here!
Just starting reading comments after my last post and realized I'm late on the "Speaking of interpecies rape...." joke. Apologies.
It sucks not having hands.
Could be worse - why do you think T-Rex was so pissed off all the time? Those dinky little arms just couldn't reach the joy zone.
Probably went extinct due to being driven crazy by itchy testicles, too.
Haven't there been cases in Africa of adolescent bull elephants trying to copulate with rhinos (who then get tusked to death because they don't want any)?
Are they sure that was a penguin? It could've been a nun.
I recall seeing a Canada Goose raping Muscovy ducks. They all lived at a water treatment plant, in a fowl, kinky coven.
And if masturbation was a big no-no, why aren't our arms shorter (a la T Rex)?
"If ever there was an appropriate time to play Barry White in accompaniment..."
No no no, I think Frank Zappa would be better 'Like a Penguin in Bondage'!
I'm amazed I didn't remember that song yesterday.
As some people already noted, this is a classic case of Not News.
In fact it is a classic case of too much time wasted doing science, and not enough time spent studying CollegeHumor.com
http://www.collegehumor.com/picture:1798373
http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1760116
http://www.collegehumor.com/picture:1797729
http://www.collegehumor.com/picture:1805353
http://www.collegehumor.com/picture:1756159
http://www.collegehumor.com/picture:1607836
(Yes, I know, most of those are animals in zoos and domestic animals, which are known to engage in wierd behavior.)
There was a case in the news years ago of a lovesick moose in Maine that spend an entire rutting season trailing around after a cow that wouldn't give him the time of day. Nature is strange. Hybridization happens, if biology permits.
This is interclass rape.
It's not just interspecies. Mammal's attempts at sexual activity with other mammals is well recorded as you point out. It's a mammal trying to rape a bird.
Strikes me as really interesting. A conflated food with sex:
People eat cows, sheep, horses and dogs, and there is some really disturbing pornography out there... You might be onto something!
A tom turkey fell in love with me once--and no, he wasn't simply being aggressive. It was mating season, and every time he saw me, he abandoned the hens and came over and did his display thing--quite pretty, I do admit. Soon, he figured out where I sat at the computer, and I'd be calmly typing and suddenly, GOBBLEGOOBLE very loudly just outside my window, which is startling.
I was rather flattered. It had been a slow year.
It's not a leopard seal.
My first two links were mammal-bird, even if the mammals in question were dogs, which can be completely nuts.
This was originally an article from the Onion. A classic. http://members.fortunecity.com/mtracey/christy.htm