While on the road I received an email update from HarkonnenDog about gay penguins. It seems their homosexuality is so entrenched that zoological attempts at conversion therapy have proved useless:

Trying to get three gay penguin couples back on the straight and narrow, zoo officials in the northern German town of Bremerhaven hoped Swedish penguin ladies would do the trick. So far, there's been no success.

The zoo came up with the ingenious idea of trying to convert the feathered queens by flying in some exotic birds from Scandinavia. But thus far, the boys haven't exactly been fighting for a taste of the action. On the contrary, they have shown their suitors the cold shoulder.

"The relationships were obviously too serious," zoo director Heike Kück said of the same sex penguin couples who seem to prefer sitting on stones, which serve as a replacement for the eggs they will never be able to lay, to flapping about over the evidently superfluous seductresses.

I think the bureaucrats ought to let them keep the stone eggs. If they must engage in anthropormorphic antics, they could always name one of them "Pebbles."

Years ago I had a beautiful pair of albino Oscars (Astronotus ocellatus) I'd raised together in the hope they'd breed. They did the mating dance, and they even laid eggs and went through the protecting rituals. Unfortunately, the "male" never fertilized the eggs, and as it turned out, I had a lesbian couple. They were completely bonded as a pair though, and had I attempted to introduce an intruder, they'd have killed him immediately. Oscars are remarkably intelligent fish, and they bond for life. These bonds are so strong that if the fish are separated, they'll often die of depression. It killed me to have to part with the lesbian Oscars (somehow that sounds like a special award), but I found a woman who agreed never to separate them. I think that whether in animals or people, bonding is as important as (if not more important than) sexuality, with the latter flowing from the former at least as often as the other way around. It makes sense, because bonding survives even when sexuality withers away from disease or old age. It begs the question of labels.