Whales are extraordinarily sensual creatures. Those bare bodies are highly sensitive and sensitive. At social gatherings, pods of sperm, humpbacks and right whales will roll around each other’s bodies for hours at a time. I saw a group of whales engaged in foreplay and penetration that lasted all morning.
I also watched a husband-wife couple so blissfully entwined that they appeared undisturbed by our fishing boat as they passed underneath. And in what might sound like a career of whale voyeurism, I’m also caught up in a fast-moving superpod of dusky dolphins constantly rapidly penetrating each other, regardless of the gender of their partner.
That’s why this week’s report of the first scientifically documented male-to-male sexual interactions between two humpback whales on the coast of Hawaii is not surprising.
The remarkable image of a two-metre-long whale penis entering another male “leaves little room for discussion that there is a sexual component to such behaviour”, as one cetacean scientist, Jeroen Hoekendijk at the Wageningen Marine Research institute in the Netherlands, dryly notes.
In fact, one of the whales was sick and there was speculation that the encounter might not have been consensual or that the healthy whale was actually comforting the other. Whatever the truth, such “flagrant” acts also expose many of our human assumptions about sexuality, gender and identity.
On the northwest Pacific coast of the US, male orcas often leave family pods to rub their erections against each other’s bellies. But women did also reportedly seen also sexual contact with each other.
Indeed, the graphic accounts of male-to-male behavior can mask many “invisible” female-to-female sexual interactions.
Dr Conor Ryan, an honorary research fellow at the Scottish Society for Marine Science, notes: “It is easy to visually identify male ‘homosexual’ sex when an extended penis can be two meters long.” It is less easy to diagnose when female sperm whales are seen “cuddling”, as Hoekendijk observes.
Ryan often witnessed same-sex behavior between whales and dolphins. “I’m interested in the things we miss,” he says. He recorded competitive behavior by humpback whales in groups that appeared to be typically male, such as chasing around other whales.
But they have proven, from DNA samples, to be genetically female. He speculates that humpback females may even use whale song – which until now was thought to be the province of mating males.
“If I were a woman harassed by horny men, I might sing too,” says Ryan. “To attract more females, to draw attention away from me, while they pose as a male.”
Tthese observations raise new ideas about the way these animals behave. Whale society is almost overwhelmingly matriarchal. For example, female sperm whales travel in large groups – sometimes thousands strong – in which males are only “useful” for their sperm, visit the groups briefly and then leave the females to their own society.
Male-oriented science has made various statements about sexual behavior in the past. But the idea of lesbian whales shouldn’t be surprising. Ryan even cites the case of a “non-binary” belugawhich was discovered to have both male and female genitalia.
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Even identifying as a species can be fluid for cetaceans. In 2022, a bottlenose dolphin was found near Caithness in Scotland identify as a porpoise, swimming with a pod of porpoises and using their vocalizations. In one of the great queer pairings of the 20th century, Virginia Woolf referred to her lover, Vita Sackville-West, as “my porpoise”.
WI cannot know how whales and dolphins themselves view genital interactions. But in most cases, they seem to enjoy it—perhaps without the preconceptions that we humans as a species have historically projected onto such behavior. They may make good clickbait on social media, but they also have important relevance to us.
When Canadian biologist Bruce Bagemihl published his book Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity – list 450 species that exhibit such behaviorincluding whales and dolphins – this was used as evidence in a US Supreme Court case in 2003 which struck down homophobic “sodomy” laws used in Texas as unconstitutional.
It is also telling that the most famous work of literary fiction written about whales, Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick, is a definite strange book. Melville brings together the peculiarity and diversity of his characters – his narrator, Ishmael, is declared married to his shipmate, the heavily tattooed Queequeg, based on a Māori warrior – with the mysterious sensuality of the whales he describes. He even spends an entire chapter describes a whale’s foreskinwith joyful insinuations.
The sea itself seems to be a strange place, where gender is sometimes a slippery notion at best. Slipper shells stuck together on the beach that you might find when beach hunting are actually changing sex, from female below to male above. In any case, whales’ genitals are hidden in genital slits. Sleek and streamlined, it’s as if troublesome sexual definitions have been overtaken by the sheer beauty of amazing hydrodynamics.
So much of what we project onto whales and dolphins is about our own complexes. They seem to live a free and easy life. They may not possess hands to manipulate, but they have the biggest brains on the planet and highly sensual bodies to match. Because they have existed for millions of years, it is tempting to imagine their long-evolved existence as one that is beyond all the things that seem to hold us humans back.
