CONNOR BUTLER: Historically, when people would see beetles
mating with each other, they'd often assume that there would be
a male and a female.
But actually, what these scientists then did was prove,
if you take a closer look, it's often not the case, we can't
presume, we shouldn't presume what we know about nature
because nature doesn't follow our rules.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Hello, I'm Ranger Rosie Holdsworth, and
today we're looking for a beetle whose flaps caused a flap in
entomology and how projecting society onto science has shaped
our understanding of the natural world.
Can we ever let bugs be bugs?
Welcome to Wild Tales, the queer life of a cockchafer.
CONNOR BUTLER: So today I am walking around Osterley Park.
It's a beautiful day. Because now is the perfect time to try
and find some insects.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: This is Connor Butler, an ecologist and
entomologist. He spends his days tracking down bugs and teaching
others about their weird and wonderful nature.
CONNOR BUTLER: The reason I love insects so much is firstly
because they are everywhere.
The good thing about that is that you're never bored in life.
You can always find insects.
And there's something about looking for things that are
small and hidden that kind of makes them feel a bit like
treasure.
They're so pretty when you look at them up close.
It's interesting to me that these beetles are so, so
brightly colored, dung beetles especially, they live their life
in animal poo, and yet so many of them are these metallic blues
and greens.
Why did they evolve this amazing colour? It's bizarre to me.
That's kind of why I like them. They just sort of defy
expectations of what normality is.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Standing under the shade of a huge gnarled oak
tree, Connor inspects the leaves of a lush green canopy, the
veins shining through its cloud-shaped leaves.
CONNOR BUTLER: And what I'm looking for right now is any
damage, any bite marks that could have been done by insects.
And I've seen a few leaves, they've got these big chunks
taken out of and what I'm really looking for is a really special
beetle called a cockchafer.
And what they're doing is they're feeding on leaves of
trees.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: The cockchafer goes by many names, a June bug,
a May bug, or a doodlebug for their loud and clumsy flight.
CONNOR BUTLER: I call them Cockchafers.
So cockchafer, the first part of the word means something that's
big, kind of very mighty cos it's quite a big beetle.
And chafer comes from the old word for chewing, because all
beetles have these chewing mouth parts.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: The life cycle of this bug is extraordinary.
They spend 3 to 4 years underground as grubs munching on
roots before metamorphosing like a butterfly, sometimes in their
thousands into their adult forms, but they also have
another claim to fame.
CONNOR BUTLER: Cockchafers were the first ever species of animal
to be illustrated depicting same-sex sexual behavior.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Same-sex mating in animals has been
documented for hundreds of years, but studying this
behaviour has always come up against a problem. Us.
Some people refer to this as Darwin's paradox. If sex isn't
for reproduction, we dismiss it.
This is what makes the 1896 illustration of the cockchafer
so special, but it was not a simple journey to get there. It
took entomologists six decades to create this image.
In 1834, an entomologist and schoolteacher, August Kelch,
came across two mating Cockchafers whilst wandering in
a forest in Germany, but he noticed something.
CONNOR BUTLER: So the way you can actually determine what sex
a beetle is, for Cockchafers is you count the number of flaps on
their antennae, and males have got 7 flaps and females have got
6.
And when this German entomologist looked at these two
beetles, he realized that they both had 7 flaps, they were both
male.
And so he was very confused why these two male beetles were
reproducing or attempting to reproduce with each other.
And so he thought that it was probably a dominance thing,
because the male European cockchafer is much bigger than
the forest cockchafer.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: The mating was dismissed, but the sightings
keep happening in a lemon grove in France, in fireflies dancing
above a pond, and more and more frequently in the laboratory of
entomologists.
But it isn't until 1896 that pen is put to paper.
CONNOR BUTLER: There's a French entomologist called Henri
Gardeau de Kerville, and he does the first ever illustration of
these beetles. He draws two male Cockchafers mating each other.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: It's a delicate diagram of two beetles
linked by their perineum, which looks like a stinger.
CONNOR BUTLER: And when he published this, it was really
controversial because of course it shows something that was
considered to be kind of unnatural, and a lot of people
were very negative towards this.
But he said it was so common that it kind of showed that
there was this intrinsic nature of these beetles to do this.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: This conclusion began a decades-long
argument between entomologists. On one side, Henri Gardeau de
Kerville argued that some Cockchafers were doing it by
preference.
On the other, a French physician and neurologist, Charles Fére,
insisted that the hot-blooded males were tricked into
unnatural acts by misleading pheromones.
This long argument didn't really teach us anything definitive
about Cockchafers. We still don't know why some of them
choose to mate with other males, but it did teach us a lot about
humanity.
CONNOR BUTLER: Now what's really interesting about the case of
the cockchafer is that that kind of bias in society, we're always
trying to justify why something is doing something.
So if we see two male beetles attempting to mate with each
other, we're always trying to explain away that it could be
something that is homosexual, and we don't of course, we don't
know with nature.
But by trying to say that it's a dominance thing, or it's an
aggression thing kind of-
It's quite a closed-minded approach, I think.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: This'explain the gay away' is a common
phenomenon in natural history, but in many cases, research was
buried completely.
It's difficult to know exactly how much research has been
hidden, suppressed, or ignored, but as recently as the 1980s,
Doctor Janet Mann witnessed " More gay sex than imaginable"
amongst dolphins, but delayed the publishing of her findings,
fearful of being pigeonholed and fearful of the misrepresentation
of her research.
CONNOR BUTLER: Imagine if you were in the 1890s and you see
this drawing of these two male Cockchafers mating with each
other.
It was kind of the first time that the idea of homosexuality
being something that was natural was brought into science. And so
it was really controversial, but also I think it was probably
quite powerful for a lot of people to see themselves, yeah,
reflected in nature.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Seeing same-sex behaviour in nature was
and still can be revolutionary. After hearing about the first
discovery of male Cockchafers mating in Germany, Karl Heinrich
Ulrichs, one of the earliest advocates for LGBTQ + rights,
wrote in 1879: "
Sexual orientation is a right established by nature.
Legislators have no right to veto nature, no right to
persecute nature in the course of its work, no right to torture
living creatures who are subject to those drives nature gave
them. The battle against nature is a hopeless one."
That's a really good quote on many levels, like, it's a good
quote.
Science is meant to be objective, to give us the facts,
but in reality, our science is influenced by society.
From the lack of research on women's health to ignoring sex
for pleasure in dolphins, our science has bias.
Naturalists have long warned against anthropomorphizing
animals. The natural world follows different rules to our
own.
Yet it's something we do time and time again, unconsciously
and unquestioningly. So our science continues to reflect our
societal values, whatever they might be.
And although our society has changed and is still changing,
there remains some evidence of the bias we saw 100 years ago.
CONNOR BUTLER: Earlier last year, there was a case of two
humpback whales that were found mating with each other and it
was the first time humpback whales had ever been
photographed mating.
And it turned out that actually there were two male humpback
whales. And of course, there was a lot of controversy, a lot of
people were saying, oh, it's just a dominance thing, it's an
aggression thing.
But really, we can never know and that's kind of the whole
point.
We see homosexual activity in nature, it's really common. If
you ever raised chickens or studied insects, it's really
common to see same-sex couples and same-sex matings.
And so all we can say is it exists in nature. We don't
necessarily need to justify why it's happened because we'll
never really know.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: We see in the headlines from time to time, gay
penguin dads, gay dolphins, a panic about mushrooms changing
sex but the truth is that these headlines obscure something
vital.
Sex and gender in nature is more diverse, more expansive and far
more fluid than we could ever imagine. It's our assumptions
about nature that can limit our understanding.
CONNOR BUTLER: Queer ecology is trying to unlearn a lot of that.
And the more we learn about nature, the more we realize that
it's incredibly diverse. It doesn't follow all the rules of
society, it doesn't follow the binaries, it's really fluid.
And I think from that we can then look at ourselves and
realize that actually, we're all part of nature and our fluidity
is also part of nature.
And I think that when you then start to question those things,
you look at nature very differently.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: For hundreds of years, members of the LGBTQ +
community have been told that something about them is
unnatural.
And looking at bugs may not have the answer to a societal
problem, but Connor knows first hand the impact it can have.
CONNOR BUTLER: So I do a lot of queer ecology walks where I take
people out into nature and I look at plants and animals that
have kind of unconventional life cycles.
And what I found really interesting is that people find
it cathartic to see lots of plants and animals with these
really diverse life cycles, whether or not they're asexual,
if it's a bird that has the same sexual pairings, if it's a
woodlouse that is changing sex or a tree that is changing sex,
and people like to see themselves reflected in nature.
It's a hard thing growing up if you're a queer person,
especially in today's society. I mean, it's always been hard, but
It's good to have people that are connected to to nature.
But it's a slippery slope as well, because there's also lots
of really horrible things in nature.
There's parasitism, there's murder, there's things eating
each other. So really, we shouldn't try and use nature as
the basis for what we think is right or moral, and actually
should just do what we as humans think is right, which is that
everyone should be accepted to be who they are and just be
themselves.
So as much as you want to take away from insects and we see
these same-sex matings, at the end of the day, we're all just
trying to get through life and hopefully flip over some logs
and see some nice bugs now and again.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Thanks for joining me in this wild tale. Do
you have an amazing story about the natural world? I'd love to
hear from you. You can find us on Instagram @wildtalesNT where
you'll also find behind the scenes moments, nature's giants,
and the micro wonders that make our world the place it is.
Use the hashtag #Wildtaleswednesdays, or email
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While you're there, why not check out our history show back
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See you next time.