Lesbian Albatrosses Hatch Chick

You've heard of And Tango Makes Three — the heart-warming tale of two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo who warmed a rock as if it were an egg before being given an actual egg, from which young Tango hatched.

Well, here's the lesbian counterpart. Two female royal albatrosses spurned a would-be male suitor and have hatched an egg together in a breeding colony in New Zealand.

A previous 'lesbian' couple at the same breeding ground lasted for 20 years — talk about family values — but 90 percent of their eggs were infertile.

As was the case with Tango's parents, ornithologists who work near the colony where the 'lesbian' couple hatched their chick sometimes use same-sex mates as foster parents. But this couple's egg was apparently fertilized the old-fashioned way.

Lyndon Perriman, a ranger with New Zealand's Department of Conservation, explained that the all-female pair would raise the chick exactly as any male-female pair would.

He added, "They need to have a very strong bond, because when they are sitting on the eggs they can sit there for a week or 10 days waiting for the partner to come back, so they need to have a good partner to rely on."

Although serious research into homosexual behavior among animals is relatively new, there is no species on Earth — barring the asexual and the hermaphroditic — which has been shown not to engage in homosexual activity.

Biological explanations vary. In some cases, one sex dramatically outnumbers the other, as is the case in a Hawaiian albatross colony where a third of all couplings involve two females. Additionally, same-sex pairings offer a useful second-change for offspring that have lost parents of been rejected by them.

Of course, neither explanation is apt in this case, leaving another possibility: The two birds like each other.

Photo credit: Mila Zinkova