I’ll forever hold a tender home in my heart for stories of lifelong pair bonds in animals. Sequencer readers may remember all the times I’ve melted over the live feeds of Jackie and Shadow, SoCal’s famous bald eagle lovebirds who have been together since ~2018. No shade to the poly Sequins among us. You do you. That’s none of my business.
What IS my business though—or, what I’m making my business as of writing—is the swinging sex life of whales.
Belugas are hard to study because they’re the only whale species living exclusively in the Arctic and sub-Arctic and often obstructed by sea ice. And those waters are murky. Belugas are actually quite well adapted for non-visual life. Some call them "canaries of the sea" for all the sounds they make: clicks, clucks, whistles, high pitched chirps and low pitched moos. Such reliance on echolocation makes them vulnerable to all the human-led fuckery in our oceans: noise from construction and ships, and climate change that dials up the volume of soundwaves traveling through seawater. Some beluga populations are in decline, but they’re not globally endangered.
Belugas are survivors who, like most any species on Earth, adopted fascinating behaviors to avoid spending eternity in the history books. They’re socializers who can hunt solo or in groups. They may form large herds containing thousands of bulbous-headed individuals, and females even form nursery groups to protect the young. And now, according to a new study based on skin samples snipped over 13 years, researchers say they often swap mates from one breeding season to the next.
Partner-swapping may help both mix up the gene pool and ensure reproductive success, according to the team led by evolutionary biologist Greg O’Corry-Crowe. Both sexes were polygamous. But females were even more so. The team suspects this prevents the female whales from committing forever to an unfit male. “It’s a striking reminder that female choice can be just as influential in shaping reproductive success as the often-highlighted battles of male-male competition,” O’Corry-Crowe told Oceanographic Magazine.
Click click. Moo whistle chirp, one whale added. Which I can only surmise means “No. I don’t want no scrub.”
