For thirteen years I have surprised, amused, inspired or shocked a wide audience with the story of my necro-duck. This may well be over soon. Why? Well, my classic improbable observation is surpassed. Nico de Bruyn, a zoologist at the Mammal Research Institute of the University Pretoria, witnessed together with Cheryl A. Tosh and Marthan N. Bester how a male Antarctic fur seal tried hard to copulate with a king penguin. Given the amount of media coverage, their paper in Journal of Ethology about this amazing case of ‘interspecific sexual harassment bridging the rank of vertebrate class’ is already a classic and overshadows my ‘first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard-duck’. My congratulations to Nico de Bruyn et al!
This is the subject of my most recent blog entry (www.moeliker.com) and a column that was broadcasted May 25th 2008 on Vara’s Vroege Vogels radio-show in the Netherlands. For those of you who have trouble reading Dutch, here is the experimental Google-translated English-language version of it. It may be of help.
