Long concealed 'sexual depravity' of Antarctic penguins finally revealed

London, June 10 (ANI): A study about the Adelie penguin's sex life by Captain Scott's expedition, which was deemed too shocking for the public 100 years ago, has been unearthed at the Natural History Museum.

Dr George Murray Levick's observations of Adelie penguins were recorded in his notebook.

The sight of a young male Adelie penguin attempting to have sex with a dead female was what particularly unnerved George Murray Levick, a scientist with the 1910-13 Scott Antarctic Expedition.

No such observation had ever been recorded before, as far as he knew, and Levick, a typical Edwardian Englishman, was horrified. Blizzards and freezing cold were one thing, while penguin perversion was another.

Worse was to come, however. Levick spent the Antarctic summer of 1911-12 observing the colony of Adelies at Cape Adare, making him the only scientist to this day to have studied an entire breeding cycle there.

During that time, he witnessed males having sex with other males and also with dead females, including several that had died the previous year. He also saw them sexually coerce females and chicks and occasionally kill them.

Levick blamed this "astonishing depravity" on "hooligan males" and wrote down his observations in Greek so that only an educated gentleman would understand the horrors he had witnessed.

Back in Britain he produced a paper in English, titled 'Natural History of the Adelie Penguin'. However, the section about the animal's sexual proclivities was deemed to be so shocking it was removed to preserve decency.

Levick then used this material as the basis for a separate short paper, Sexual Habits of the Adelie Penguin, which was privately circulated among a handful of experts.

In fact, Levick's observations turned out to be well ahead of their time as scientists had to wait another 50 years before the remarkable sexual antics of the Adelie were revealed. By this time his pamphlet and its detailed records of Adelie shenanigans had been lost to science.

However, now a copy of ' Sexual Habits of the Adelie Penguin' has been unearthed, thanks to sleuthing by Douglas Russell, who discovered a copy among records of the work of Scott's expeditions and has had it published with an accompanying analysis of Levick''s work.

"The pamphlet, declined for publication with the official Scott expedition reports, commented on the frequency of sexual activity, auto-erotic behaviour, and seemingly aberrant behaviour of young unpaired males and females, including necrophilia, sexual coercion, sexual and physical abuse of chicks and homosexual behaviour," the Observer quoted the analysis written by Russell and colleagues William Sladen and David Ainley as saying.

"His observations were, however, accurate, valid and, with the benefit of hindsight, deserving of publication," the analysis said.

Levick's lost masterpiece certainly has its eye-watering moments with its descriptions of male Adelies who gather in "little hooligan bands of half a dozen or more and hang about the outskirts of the knolls, whose inhabitants they annoy by their constant acts of depravity".

Injured females are mounted by members of these "gangs", others have their chicks "misused before the very eyes of its parents". Some chicks are crushed and injured, others are killed.

It is startling stuff, though Russell said that recent studies have helped understand the behaviour of these ""hooligan"" penguins.

"Adelies gather at their colonies in October to start to breed. They have only a few weeks to do that and young adults simply have no experience of how to behave. Many respond to inappropriate cues. Hence the seeming depravity of their behaviour," Russell said.

"For example, a dead penguin, lying with its eyes half-open, is very similar in appearance to a compliant female. The result is the so-called necrophilia that Levick witnessed and which so disgusted him," he said.

In addition, the penguin is the most humanlike of all birds in its appearance and its behaviour is most often interpreted in anthropomorphic terms, added Russell.

For this reason, Adelie behaviour, when it was observed for the first time in detail, seemed especially shocking.

"Levick was also a gentleman, travelling with a group of men in very difficult circumstances, witnessing behaviour he neither expected nor understood.

"It is not surprising that he was shocked by his findings," Russell said.

The discovery of Levick's paper is important as its helps shed new knowledge on a species that has been called the bellwether of climate change.

"The Adelie needs pack ice from which to dive to get fish. When that ice disappears, numbers may crash - and we will have a clear warning that things are getting bad," Russell added.

The work of Scott's expeditions have been published in the journal Polar Record. (ANI)