Male monkeys have more same-sex romps than hookups with females: study

Sex & Relationships

By Asia Grace

August 30, 2023 | 5:18pm

These monkeys are going bananas on one another. 

Same-sex monkeying around is all the rage among the rhesus macaques on Cayo Santiago, a 38-acre island off the coast of Puerto Rico, per a July 2023 study. 

And the researchers determined that 72% of the 236 male primates enjoy engaging in gay sex. They, too, discovered that the male-on-male romps could produce reproductive benefits among the collection of mostly secluded monkeys. 

That’s wild!

“Our results demonstrate that same-sex socialsexual behavior is frequent in rhesus macaques, can evolve and is not costly [to their overall fitness],” read the study, led by Vincent Savolainen, a professor of organismic biology and director of the Georgina Mace Centre for the Living Planet at Imperial College London. 

In 2017, 2019 and 2020, Savolainen and his team closely observed the social and mounting behaviors of the rhesus macaques — descendants of apes that were transported to the tiny island from India for remote observations back in 1938. Savolainen notes that the rhesus macaques shared a common ancestor with humans approximately 25 million years ago, per the study. 

He and the analysts found that the same-sex behaviors of the macaques were both repeatable and heritable — meaning the monkeys copycatted the intercourse they observed and, in addition, performed the act based on their genetic predisposition.

However, the investigation found that only 6% of the gay rendezvous could be attributed to the monkeys’ genes. 

And while same-sex hanky-panky among animals might sound unusual, it’s far from uncommon. 

In fact, homosexuality in both male and female penguins around the world has become a trending craze online, including a pair of gay birds at Syracuse, New York’s Rosamond Gifford Zoo that became first-time dads on New Year’s Day 2022.

In 2017, a 186-year-old tortoise named Jonathan was discovered to be enamored with his male lover, a tortoise known as Frederic. 

In the case of the macaques, however, researchers found that the same-sex dalliance were mostly rooted in social perks — such as improved evolutionary fitness — rather than romance. 

They, too, discovered that rather than one male monkey asserting his dominance over another through mounting, the macaques view the sexual act as somewhat of a “wingman” bonding ritual when it comes to mating with females or supporting one another in spats with other monkeys. 

“We found that males that mounted each were also more likely to support each other during conflicts with other individuals as part of coalitions,” read the study. “In macaques, forming male coalitions has been shown to improve reproductive success, indicating that social benefits of [same-sex social-sexual behavior] can at least partly explain its evolutionary maintenance in these primates.”

The findings challenge the long-upheld Darwinian paradox introduced by Charles Darwin, who theorized that it’s nearly impossible for a species to survive by engaging in nonreproductive activities such as same-sex relationships. 

However, the study’s eye-popping implications notwithstanding, skeptical scientists who didn’t participate in Savolainen’s research caution against applying the data from the monkeys to other primates — including humans. 

“The setup is that same-sex sexual behavior is a weird puzzle that doesn’t make evolutionary sense, and we have to solve it based on usefulness from a fitness perspective,” Michelle Rodrigues, an assistant professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Sciences at Marquette University, told Scientific American in reference to Savolainen’s report. “That can be reductionist and lead to making assumptions or generalizations about behavior that we can’t begin to understand in other animals because of different cultural constructions.”

She added that such studies are “valuable for understanding things like the evolution of social and sexual relationships.

“At the same time,” continued Rodrigues, “we have to be really careful about what conclusions we are drawing and how that will be applied to understanding humans.”

Savolainen agreed. 

“One thing that we can probably say is that we can learn from related species about our past, but obviously humans have evolved in societies that are very different from the macaques,’ ” he told the outlet. 

“Some people might say that whatever you find in animals is irrelevant to what humans might face,” said Savolainen. “But what would be interesting to see is: Do people feel better by realizing that it’s something very common in nature? In societies that condemn homosexuality even with the death penalty, they often say that with scientific evidence that it is natural, they wouldn’t be so harsh on them.”

The researcher hopes his discovery aids in quelling extreme responses to same-sex activities, noting that the macaques prove that the behavior is “actually beneficial.”

“Which should be a refreshing take on what’s going on in nature,” said Savolainen.