How zoology got it wrong about females in the animal world

Stereotypes of dominant males and docile females have shaped zoology since the time of Charles Darwin. This interpretation is still often unchallenged today in nature textbooks and documentaries.

A new book debunks this sexist fallacy and tells a fuller story about the role of females in nature.

It’s a story that matters because animals are often used to discuss supposed fundamental differences between male and female humans — and the notion that males are hardwired to assume alpha status and females are passive.

That view has been completely exaggerated and doesn’t hold up when you look at the diversity of the animal kingdom, says Lucy Cooke, documentarian and author of “Bitch: On the Female of the Species,” published in the United States. United on Tuesday (7).

Females are just as competitive, aggressive and dynamic as males and play an equal role in driving evolutionary change, according to Cooke.

To prove his point, Cooke, who holds a master’s degree in zoology from the University of Oxford, loves to detail the lives of a riot of colorful animals: murderous meerkat mothers, menopausal orca matriarchs and albatrosses who can form lasting lesbian partnerships.

“I found it very satisfying to discover the diversity of the female experience, which is not governed by these kind of depressing patriarchal rules,” Cooke told CNN .

The Myth of Female Monogamy

It’s a familiar trope in nature documentaries. Male animals are aggressively promiscuous, but their female counterparts are shy and demanding.

However, throngs of female animals seek sex with multiple partners. A lioness has been known to mate up to 100 times a day with multiple male suitors during heat.

Songbirds are socially monogamous as they build nests and feed their chicks together, but before nesting, 90% of songbirds often have sex with multiple partners, according to the research. A nest egg can have many parents, even if a single male bird is raising young alongside its female co-parent.

The fact was revealed by a DNA test of the eggs of the eastern bluebird — a technique first used by Patricia Gowaty, professor emeritus of evolutionary biology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“I got a lot of criticism for this study,” Cooke quotes Gowaty saying in his book. “It was like I discovered something, but it offended so many people it was unbelievable. They could not imagine that women were anything but benign”;

It wasn’t until the 1990s that the ornithological world accepted that female birds were promiscuous, opening the floodgates for similar studies of reptiles and amphibians. Altogether, experts now think true monogamy is only found in 7% of species, according to Cooke’s book.

Promiscuity to protect young people

What role does all this sex play in the animal kingdom? It’s not just about maximizing the chances of getting pregnant. It is a strategy that for some animals can increase the chances of survival of their young.

Male langur monkeys in India routinely kill weaned babies when they take over a group, studies have shown. Since then, the same behavior has been observed in dozens of other primate species, including chimpanzees — as well as animals like lions.

Experts think that females are tricked into having sex with male suitors outside and within their group to confuse paternity, which has the effect of protecting their offspring and may co-opt male partners to care for them.

Aggressive sexuality is seen among female chimpanzees, who only produce five or six offspring in a lifetime but can have sex thousands of times with dozens of male chimpanzees. This aggressive female sexual behavior is also seen in savanna baboon monkeys.

“The idea that females are just as sexually aggressive as males — it’s not something that a lot of people are going to be comfortable with,” Cooke said. But for some animals, promiscuity is being a caring mother.

sexual anatomy

You might think genitals are the defining feature of the sexes, but Cooke found that dozens of female animals exhibit a sexual anatomy that is distinctly phallic.

Take the female African spotted hyena. She has an eight-inch clitoris that is shaped and positioned exactly like a male penis. This female hyena also has erections and is larger, more aggressive than male hyenas and lives in matrilineal clans of up to 80 individuals ruled by an alpha matriarch.

The study of the spotted hyena and other “masculinized animals” such as lemurs and mole rats has shed light on how an animal becomes female – a field that has been understudied.

Traditionally, testosterone was thought to be the driving force that programmed embryos to be male, with the assumption that “female” was the passive pattern. But it is now seen as a very rigid way of looking at the differences between the sexes.

Female domain

It has been difficult for biology to accept the alpha female. Researchers have already dismissed the hierarchical struggle between female pinyon jays as “the avian equivalent of PMS,” according to Cooke’s book.

But many animal societies are dominated by women, including the aforementioned hyenas, and sometimes things can get aggressive.

Clans of meerkats, the fluffy mongooses that stand up on their hind legs to scan the African savannah, are dominated by a single female that monopolizes reproduction. Her main goal is to prevent her female relatives from having babies of their own – instead, she co-opts them to care for her young.

Once its rivals reach their reproductive age, the alpha meerkat either kills them or kicks them out of the group.

“It’s called cooperative breeding, which always makes me laugh because it’s not much,” Cooke said. “It’s a little despotic.”

Unlike their close chimpanzee relatives, bonobos have a female-dominated society. However, they do not fight each other. Instead, female bonobos forge a formidable sisterhood – all to regulate tension and promote cooperation.