Paging Anita: Gulls found to be gay

SANTA BARBARA ISLAND, Calif. (P) Scientists visited this island to learn why some gulls make better parents than others. They stayed to find out why some gulls don't become parents at all. They're homosexual.

“We were absolutely incredulous," said Dr. George L. Hunt Jr., a member of a University of California at Irvine research team that has studied 1,200 pairs of Western gulls since 1974.

"This sort of thing has not been found before (in wild birds) and was clearly not what we anticipated," Hunt said..

"This is the first case (among wild birds) of homosexual pairs in which everything except copulation is done as if they were normal pairs," said Dr. Donald Farner, a professor of zoophysiology at the University of Washington. Scientists had previously discovered evidence of homosexuality among other animals, including dogs.

Farner, whose team has taken blood samples from several hundred birds to see whether hormones are responsible for. the homosexuality, said the gulls "incubate eggs, defend territory, and one of the females be

haves as if she were the male in courtship behavior."

Farner said the homosexuality in every case involves lesbian rather than male homosexual behavior. Females outnumber males on the island.

Homosexuality was recently discovered among male ducks at the Stanley Park Zoo in Vancouver, British Columbia, where there is a shortage of female ducks.

The gull homosexuality was discovered by accident after the Irvine team arrived in 1974 to conduct research into parenting. The research-

ers found that 3 to 14% of the nests contained four or more eggs instead of the usual maximum of three.

They discovered that some nests were occupied by two females, each of which was laying her normal quota of two or three eggs. These eggs, however, were infertile.

The researchers found that some of the all-female couples formed stable unions which lasted through consecutive breeding seasons.

The research effort was first reported in a recent issue of Science, journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.