21 minute read
The Female of the Species
biology has been “all about the boys,” with the males of the species being presented as drivers of change and females as passive figures, zoologist Lucy Cooke argues. Cooke instead seeks to humorously reinvent the narrative—and show just how fierce, dangerous and hilarious the queens of the animal kingdom can be. From the June 21, 2022, program “Lucy Cooke: The Queens of the Animal Kingdom.” LUCY COOKE, Zoologist; Author, Bitch: On the Female of the Species
It’s great to be speaking here in San Francisco, because last time I was [at the Club], I was down in Silicon Valley. So it’s fantastic to be in this fabulous building to talk to you about how female animals have been marginalized and misunderstood by the scientific patriarchy.
I’ll kick off with a flavor of the kind of marginalized behavior that I’m talking about with my tutor from Oxford, Richard Dawkins. He was a very terrifying man to write an essay for, I can tell you. He was the author of the The Selfish Gene, and the Selfish Gene had this to say about females— that “the female is exploited, and the fundamental evolutionary basis for the exploitation is the fact that eggs are larger than sperms. Female exploitation begins here.” [That’s] a pretty depressing statement to receive, as an egg-making student of evolution, but you can’t blame Dawkins for this sentiment, because it goes further back all the way to my scientific hero, Charles Darwin.
Charles Darwin was an incredible scientist. His theory of evolution by natural selection is one of the greatest theories in the whole of science. But he was also a man of his time, so when he came to define the sexes, he branded the female of the species in the shape of a Victorian housewife, because that was what was appropriate for the time. And because Darwin said it, all the scientists that followed in his wake suffered from a chronic case of confirmation bias and either just ignored things that didn’t fit in with the paradigm that he’d set up, or they just didn’t study females at all.
He outlined his idea of the sexes in his second great theoretical
PHOTO BY PHOTO RABE / PIXABAY
LUCY COOKE
THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES
masterpiece, which was published in 1871, which is The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. He said that “The males of almost all animals have stronger passions than the females. Hence it is the males that fight together and sedulously display their charms before the females. The female on the other hand with the rarest of exceptions, is less eager than the male she generally requires to be courted. She is coy.” Now try telling a
female spotted hyena that she needs to be coy and submissive, and she’ll laugh in your face after she’s bitten it off.
We now know that females are just as competitive, aggressive, dominant, promiscuous, dynamic and varied as males. It’s just for centuries we either weren’t looking or didn’t want to see it. But thankfully things are starting to change. In the last few decades, a revolution has been brewing, which is redefining not just the female of the species, but the very forces that shape evolution.
HEAR ME ROAR
I’m going to introduce you to some of the females that are part of that revolution. We’ll start with the lioness. The lioness is really special to me, because it was the first inkling that I had that females didn’t behave in the way that I’d been taught at university. They weren’t submissive, coy and chaste, as Darwin had outlined.
About 15 years ago, I was in the Serengeti and I was making a series for the BBC about animal communication. We were basically trying to have a conversation with a lion,
which is actually not that difficult. All you need is a loud speaker with a lion’s roar. We had a recording of a lion’s roar, and I was with Dr. [Ludwig] Siefert, who was a German expert in lion communication. We played the sound of a lion’s roar out of a little portable speaker.
First of all, the sound of a lion’s roar is nothing like the MGM sound that you’re familiar with. It’s not a kind of majestic roar; it actually sounds more like a sort of [a low-energy roar], kind of almost as if Boris Johnson was looking for cheese at midnight; that kind of sound. [Laughter.] It doesn’t sound like the sound of a lion’s roar. So the whole thing seemed completely crazy to me.
There was this sort of [low-energy roar] sound coming out of a loudspeaker; I was like, this is never going to work, but it did. Sure enough, we [played our] sound, and then in the distance [we heard a lion’s roar] and then got closer and we play our roar. We played audio ping pong with this lion for about 5 minutes until out of the gloom, padded not one but three lions, two males and a female.
And the males, as soon as they came across nothing, they didn’t find anything that looked or smelt like a male lion, they just disappeared. But the female lion pinned us to the spot and lay in front of the jeep, her legs akimbo, and wouldn’t move for 2 hours. We were stuck there.
I said to Dr. Siefert, “What’s going on?”
And he goes, “Ah, she wants to mate with us.”
I was like, “Yeah, but isn’t she like mating with one of those males that she was with?”
He’s like, “Oh, ja, ja, ja, ja, , but the female lioness, she’s amazingly promiscuous. She’ll mate over a hundred times in a matter of days with multiple males during estrous.”
Whoa, that wasn’t what I was taught. That’s news to me. I was sort of quietly thrilled and curious about this incredibly licentious nature of the lioness.
Well, we now know why the lioness behaves in such a promiscuous way, thanks to Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who I think might be listening [to this Club program] online. Sarah is really a trailblazer in challenging these stereotypes. She’s the first person to look at
this conundrum of female sexual strategy.
Sarah was studying at Harvard and she went into the field to study langurs to find out about infanticide, because the males are infanticidal, and they sometimes kill females’ babies. But what she also noticed was that the females were very actively soliciting sex from males outside of the group. She was really the first scientist to not ignore this behavior that didn’t fit the paradigm but to go, “Well, this is interesting, now why is this happening?” She figured out that it was actually connected with infanticide. She worked out that basically the males are infanticidal because if a new male comes into a territory, then the females, if they’ve got babies already and they’re nursing the babies, they’re not going to be receptive to having babies with this new male. But if [the males] kill the babies, then she’ll be forced into estrus and she’ll be receptive. So if the females have this counter strategy by mating with all the males in the area, then that prevents them killing the babies, because the males, all they have to remember is if they’ve recently had sex with a female then not to kill the babies.
So this theory has now been applied to over 50 species, including lions. It’s the same story with lions. Basically the females are mating with multiple males to protect their offspring. They’re being good moms. In some cases they have an awful lot of sex in order to protect their offspring. We know that an ovulating chimp female might solicit sex with every male in her community and have sex 30 to 50 times a day. It sounds positively exhausting, doesn’t it? Barbary cat females are equally lustful, with one female recorded having sex at least once every 17 minutes with every sexually mature male in the group, of which they were 11. So what’s really interesting is in human society, females would be given all sorts of bad names for such behavior. But as Sarah says, actually these females are just being seriously maternal. They’re actually being good moms, and that’s why they’re behaving in that way.
VULTURE PIE AND FEMINIST DARWINISTS So when I came to start researching this book, Sarah was top of my list of people that I wanted to get in touch with. I wrote
to her; she actually lives here in California. She very generously responded and said, “Yeah, come visit me; I’ve got a walnut farm and you can come and visit me at the farm.” I was kind of nervous, because I had been taught by Richard Dawkins, who’s a scary character. Here was a woman who’s got an equal canon of work —she’s written at least three brilliant books.
I was kind of nervous about going there, but when I got there, I couldn’t have been made more welcome, because Sarah actually baked me a pie. She listened to my previous book the night before on audiobook and knew that I love vultures, and so she baked me a vulture pie. There were no vultures in the pie;
it was a chicken pie. It was delicious. But she put vultures on the top because she knew I loved vultures, which was incredibly sweet. She has been incredibly welcoming and a great mentor throughout the whole of this project.
What was even more amazing than her pie were her house guests, because she had staying with her at the time Mary Jane WestEberhard and Jeanne Altmann. Together these women have redefined what it means to be female. They have fought the scientific patriarchy with fierce data and logic. We owe them a huge amount. It was extraordinary to get to meet them. I like to think of them as the rabble-rousing matriarchs of modern Darwinism. The fourth member of the crew is Patricia Adair Gowaty. These women call themselves feminist Darwinists; they’re not saying that Darwin was all wrong by any means, it’s just that he was looking at the world through a Victorian pinhole camera. Thanks to their work and the scientists that they’ve inspired, we’re now getting the full Technicolor version of life. It’s so much richer and more interesting for it.
But of course tearing down paradigms doesn’t come easy and often requires a fight. Patty in particular has, despite how sweet she looks and sounds, she’s had to do quite a lot of fighting. A good example is one of her early studies, which was on songbirds. So songbirds we think of as being the sort of very paragon of monogamy. You see the male songbird, and he sings his heart out and attracts a female. Then together they’ll build a nest and raise the chicks together. But Patty was like, “I wonder whether it’s all so sweet at home as it really seems.” So what she did was something totally ingenious, which was that she co-opted technology that had been developed for forensics, DNA fingerprinting, and was the first person to use that to paternity test eggs. She took a clutch of eggs and she checked to see whether they all had the same father, and they didn’t.
Her subject was the Eastern Bluebird, which is famous from “Zip-A-Dee-DooDah” and Disney films and is about as allAmerican as apple pie. Patty was basically calling her a Jezebel, which was never going to go down well, but even she was shocked at how much resistance there was by the ornithological establishment to her data.
When she presented at an ornithological conference in the early 1980s with her data on the paternity, there was just outrage. She was told by a very famous male ornithologist that the only way that this could be possible was if the females had been raped, that’s the only answer for this. She’s like, “Well, it’s just ridiculous, because songbirds are about the only things that don’t need a MeToo movement, because it’s impossible.
It’s impossible for them to be raped, you know?” So basically songbirds, they have a cloaca. The male doesn’t have a penis to mate with the female, to fertilize her, so he’s got to balance on her back and they’ve got to line up their cloaca. So if the female is not into it at any stage, she can just fly off, you know? So the idea that she was being sexually coerced was completely ludicrous, yet that was the line that was taken.
It actually took other scientists—Bridget Stutchbury was one, putting radio trackers on female birds and tracking their movements and finding that they were actively leaving their territory and soliciting sex with other males in order to establish that the females had agency in this and they weren’t being victims.
We now know that there’s a huge difference between social and sexual monogamy. Songbirds do social monogamy very well. Sexual monogamy less so. In fact, there are only 7 percent of species of birds that are actually monogamous, and that figure may even be lower by now. Even swans are unfaithful [laughter], but this discovery sparked what was being called a polyandry revolution. We now understand that animals
as diverse as lions and lizards and lobsters— females all have a strategy of mating with multiple males. To Patricia Gowaty, it’s really obvious: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. If you mate with multiple males you have more chance of finding genetic compatibility, and basically mating with multiple males means healthier offspring. At the end of the day, females are just as sexually strategic as males.
FIGHTING WORDS
But what about another one of those myths, which is that the males are the aggressive ones; they’re competitive, aggressive; and females are a passive and are not aggressive
and not competitive. Well, females were branded basically by Darwin as having a maternal instinct; it was thought that females were good mothers. But as such, we had natural maternal instincts, and so we were all basically the same and we had no competitive edge. Well, that’s also not true. I’d like to introduce you tonight to the most murderous mammal in the animal kingdom—so, the mammal that’s most likely to kill a member of its own species . . . is the meerkat. You’re probably familiar with
the meerkat from cute TV shows. They’re incredibly cute and funny creatures. But the fact of the matter is that every meerkat has a one-in-five chance of being killed by another meerkat, most probably its own mother or sister. Meerkat society is tense and homicidal, and it’s predicated on ruthless competition between females who will readily kill and eat each other’s pups.
This is kept in check by a dominant female who’s the dominant member of the community. Meerkats live in extended family groups, and any female that dares to get pregnant by a roving male, [the dominant female will] kill their babies and evict them from the clan. Obviously in the Kalahari desert, eviction is tantamount to a death sentence. But the females are allowed back on the condition that they will witness their [baby’s] murder themselves. That enables the dominant female to put all of her energy into making more pups and not have to spend energy on lactation herself.
So you know that’s pretty brutal, and that’s how the meerkat has become the most murderous mammal on the planet. A survey of a thousand mammals found that a meerkat was the most murderous, even more so than
humans, and it’s the females that are the most aggressive.
I mean, it’s not exactly “Meerkat Manor.” It has always surprised me that meerkats have become such cozy, cute TV fodder when their society is so brutal. They are described scientifically as being cooperative, which has also struck me as somewhat ironic. It doesn’t seem much like cooperation to me. It’s more like reproductive despotism, but it’s definitely very competitive and aggressive.
SOCIAL BUTTERFLIES
Now, of course, the queens of the cooperative lifestyle are the social insects. [If you look at a pregnant] termite queen and her gargantuan distended abdomen, these are really taking this idea of cooperation to the max. You can just make out the head of the queen and her thorax and her legs; but her entire abdomen has swelled in order to just lay eggs basically, so she can lay over 20,000 eggs a day and is capable of producing, in theory, 146 million termites in her lifetime. They can live for 20 years, and they lay an egg every couple of seconds. But in order to do that, that’s all she can do, so she is serviced by an army of helpers who will feed her and clean her and look after the babies. She is the most reproductively successful animal on the planet. Yet in order to achieve this her abdomen swells over a thousand times, allowing her to spend all of that energy on laying eggs.
This extreme brand of cooperative breeding involving a clear division of labor between the queen and the workers is known as eusociality. It may seem comforting to think that just happens in insects, there’s nothing like that in mammals, we’ve got nothing so sort-of crazy sci fi going on among mammals. But we do, actually. It turns out there is a eusocial mammal out there, and it’s the naked mole rat. I happen to think that naked mole rats are incredibly cute—I may be alone in thinking that—but they are fantastically weird animals. They regularly top the uglyanimal charts; . . . they’re fantastically weird animals.
I love strange, weird animals, and I’ve wanted to see them all my life. [Naked mole rats] live in vast underground networks in very hostile places in Kenya and East Africa, under baked earth. [They are] incredibly hard to see, because they don’t pop up very often because they get burned to a crisp.
The first time I met them wasn’t in East Africa. It was in an incredibly hot cupboard in East London where [evolutionary ecologist] Chris Faulkes has been studying them. He’s created a facsimile of their underground world in this cupboard using a load of Tupperware and plastic tubing. It’s a fantastically Heath Robinson affair. But it does mean that he’s able to observe their extraordinary lifestyle.
They live in colonies up to 300, and there’s
one queen who’s the only breeding female, and she has one or two mates. Outside of those breeding individuals—the Queen and her mates—none of the other members of the colony will breed because they can’t, because they haven’t gone through puberty. So she actually suppresses their reproduction and they don’t go through puberty.
Chris has been trying to work out why and how that is. He thinks that the way that she achieves it is by basically being a royal bully. They are extraordinary creatures [that exhibit] dominance behavior, [such as] clambering over the top [of one another in their tunnels]. She basically goes round physically stating her dominance by clambering over individuals, shoving them, biting them. I mean, it suddenly all makes the British royal family seem remarkably benign. [Laughter.]
But that’s what happens to the naked mole rat queen. She’s not like the termite who lives in a royal chamber and is sort of endlessly groomed and cared for. She’s just goes round
bullying the whole time. Chris thinks that upsets the hormones and particular prolactin. It means that they never go through sexual maturity. All the while, she’s dominant and on the move and on her big royal bullying tour. Once she stops, if she becomes weak, then Chris told me all hell breaks loose and he [says], “It gets very Game of Thrones really quick,” because a bunch of females will suddenly mature. Then they will fight to the death for the queen spots, because there’s everything to fight for in that moment.
The point of life is to reproduce and they have this one opportunity. He said that, “It’s a gnawing teeth of death” and the tubes get filled with blood until a female becomes a winner. She has everything to play for because the queen is able to have litters of 27 pups at a time. This is an extraordinary feat for a mammal. She doesn’t even have that many nipples, so she can have 27 pups at a time. One female was documented having 900 pups in 24 years, which is an extraordinary output for a female.
We think of male elephant seals and the idea is that males are much more variable and much more varied in their reproductive success, because you’ll have one male that would have a bunch of females that he’ll command and the other males won’t breed. So this difference in reproductive success drives evolution. The idea was that females didn’t have that kind of difference.
Well, take a red stag, for example. They’re really famous, for the males have got these huge horns and they’ll fight each other. [One researcher] told me that the most successful
red stag he’s ever documented only ever managed to sire 25 offspring in his lifetime, for all of that fighting. And here you have the naked mole rat queen and she’s doing 900. So the idea that females are less variable than males is simply not true.
Now the female [naked mole rat] can live for 20-odd years, and you probably think to yourself, well, that’s quite a long time for an animal that size. They’re about the size of a hamster [and] should really only live about three years. This is the extra added topping on this dystopia: the queen is apparently immune to aging. It’s just extraordinary. They’re studied in Silicon Valley labs because they hold the secret to eternal youth. They can live nine times longer than is expected of a mammal their size. Their DNA doesn’t age like normal mammals. They’re immune to cancer. When you touch them, I mean, they are really soft. You wouldn’t expect it, but it’s because their skin is full of . . . this interstitial gloop that’s in super-expensive face creams—so that is the face of eternal youth. It’s not pretty, but there it is.
POD QUEEN
So you’ll be pleased to hear that female authority isn’t always so brutal. [Look at a] pod of orcas. Orcas similarly live in family groups, hugely social, highly intelligent. They’re basically souped-up dolphins; they’re the biggest member of the cetacean family. For a long time, it was thought that it was the males that were in charge. Of course, they’re bigger and the females are just the harem. But it turns out that it’s not only the females that are in charge, it’s actually the postmenopausal grannies that are in charge. The research that has revealed this happened just off the coast of Washington State; a group of orcas known as the “southern residents” have told us all about this.
It’s fascinating, because menopause is actually incredibly rare in the animal kingdom. Natural selection takes a pretty dim view of a loss of fertility. If the point of life is to reproduce, once you stop reproducing you die.
Even famously long-lived animals like Galapagos tortoises or even elephants will continue reproducing into their twilight years, which is particularly astonishing when you think an elephant has a pregnancy of 22 months and she’s still going through that ordeal in her sixties. But that is the case, right? It’s amazing.
So orcas are something of an anomaly. But it was amazing to discover that the orcas also do this, because humans had been thought of as being menopausal freaks, basically, for living beyond our reproductive fitness. But we now know we’re not alone. It’s not just orcas. There are actually four species of toothed whale that also go through menopause. What we now understand from studying the orcas, basically by stopping reproducing halfway through their life they stop competing with their daughters; and by investing instead in their existing offspring, their genetic legacy does much better in the end. . . .
Basically these old lady whales are the repositories for ecological wisdom that keep their hunting community alive.
