Perverse and cruel penguins by George Murray Levick

2012/11/01 Etxebeste Aduriz, Egoitz - Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Biografiak
• Zoologia
• Historia

"Sexual habits. We will remove this part and print only a few copies. How many of us would like? ", wrote the head of zoology of the Natural History Museum to the head of birds. He replied "100". And in February 1915 100 copies were printed, all with a bold slogan: Do not publish .

The title was The sexual habits of the Adélie penguin, the sexual customs of the Adélie penguins. Originally it was part of the book Natural History of the Adélie penguin, written by George Murray Levick. But the book was published without that part in 1915; what Levick told there was too raw to publish it.

Levick met the Adélie penguins closely. Captain Scott was the surgeon and physician of the British Antarctic Expedition of 1910. The main objective of this expedition was to reach the South Pole, but it was not the only one. For example, Lieutenant Campbell's group aimed at scientific exploration. While Scott's team was looking for the South Pole in full competition with Amundsen, Campbell's team worked a lot in the study of geology, zoology, microbiology, meteorology, etc. of the area. And in that group was Levick.

Levick was able to analyze four colonies of Adélie penguins ( Pygoscelis adeliae ). Especially from Cape Adare, the largest known colony. He spent three months photographing and pointing everything observed among the penguins of Cap Ada, from the arrival of the first penguin on October 13, 1911 to the last observations taken on December 31.

The life of those penguins was hard. Not only for the conditions they had to endure. He saw incredible things. Some of the behaviors of these human-looking birds were so altered that some of the passages collected in the notebook, to prevent anyone from reading them, wrote them in Greek alphabet.

At the end of the journey, Levick and his companions were overwhelmed. In February 1912 he had to collect the Terra Nova boats, but the sea ice closed his way. All winter had to go through a narrow ice cave. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a member of the expedition, described the situation in The Worst Journey in the World as follows: "They ate fat, cooked with fat, and had fat lamps. The clothes and utensils were completely greased and blackened by smoke, sleeping bags, pots, walls and ceiling, and jars and swollen eyes."

Unlike the Scott, Levick and his companions survived this expedition. They returned to England in 1913. The following year, Levick published his first paper on penguins: Antarctic penguins, a study of their social habits. It was a work written for the general public, which had very good reception. And in 1915 Natural History of the Adélie penguin, more technical than the previous one.

In both works, reference was made repeatedly to the behavior even though they were without a partner. Levick called them Hooligan. "They are usually in small groups around the colony. They are few at the beginning of the season, but then multiply, causing serious discomfort and damage to the rest of the peaceful population. Surely those first few are males who have not found a couple... Those that are then added will be widows, who somehow have lost the couple. (...) If a chit moves away from the nest, it has great chances of losing life in the hands of the hooligans. Their crimes are so they have no place in this book."

Precisely those "crimes" and other sexual practices were those which Levick wrote in his alphabetically Greek notebook and then were not published. For example, on November 10, he wrote: "In the afternoon I saw a male copulating with the corpse of a dead female. The action has lasted about a minute, the position of the male has been identical to that of the normal copulation and has continued until the end".

That necrophilia was excessive for a gentleman like Levick. In addition, when he returned to the camp and told a companion, he was surprised that he had also seen that behavior several times.

In addition, the penguins were totally perverted. The lone males saw them masturbate and copular without reproductive ends, even with eggs already in the nest. Once "I thought I was seeing a male copulating with a female, but when they finished, the one believed to be a female was another male; and they repeated the action changing the positions, climbing the female to the initial shoulder."

However, the worst, and along with the necropolis, which most altered Levick, were the crimes of the hooligans. Wounded, a female who could not stand up saw how three hooligans raped one after the other. And as with the chites: "Once one of the two chites who were in the nest with his mother went away a little, he was suddenly trapped by a hooligue and raped in the eyes of his mother. His mother, while he was succeeding him, followed in the nest with the other, and when the assaulted chick managed to escape and returned to his mother, he did not want to know anything with the child, who asked him every time he tried to return to the nest. Desperate, she proved if another progenitor had adopted it, but no one had done so, and she received so much picoteo that by the end she had to kill him to get rid of the pain."

P.S: Almost 100 years later, Douglass Russel, from the Natural History Museum in London, has found in the museum archives an unpublished work by Levick and has published it, together with the interpretation of experts in penguins William Sladen and David Ainley. In this article it is explained, for example, that the dead penguins have the same position as the female willing to copulate, so the observed necrophilia is a response caused by an erroneous stimulus.