Can rats be gay

They don’t really fall in love like humans do. Just be careful, guys: the ladies like the man smell.

Maybe boy rats are less interested in girl rats because they are already familiar with girls? The authors offer a couple of theories. Here’s the news: boy rats who have more sisters are less reliable heterosexuals than boy rats who have fewer sisters.

Rat pups that are neglected can literally end up with worse brain chemistry — less serotonin, fewer glucocortinoid receptors — than identical twin siblings that were nurtured usually by licking, which is sort of gross, but again: they are rats. More on Time.

A lot of their behaviors we perceive as gay are really just about dominance. In the new study, the 88 rats were kept in Plexiglas cages and subjected to a life of extreme leisure: they were fed ad libitum and kept at a constant 75 degrees F 24 degrees C.

Rats hit puberty when they are about 60 days old, so the researchers started watching them especially closely around that age. That’s not to say having a sister makes you gay, but the boy rats with lots of sisters were significantly less interested than other boy rats in mounting girl rats.

Can Rats Be Gay : Time writer John Cloud dissects a study published by

We know more about the musculature of the left femur than we do about how our brains acquire and process the desire to engage sexually. Serious answer: rat sexuality is so different from humans that I don’t think calling a rat gay or straight is really accurate.

But exactly how sexual desire develops is, even at this late date, poorly understood. The study suggests that psychology, not hormones or chemicals, is at work. The authors of the new study — psychologist Cynthia de Medeiros of the University of Toronto and four colleagues — followed a group of 88 rats after they were born.

Previous rat studies have shown that how mothers treat their newborns can influence whether genes in those newborns become activated or stay muted. How to explain these findings? There’s certainly instances of male rats trying to mate with other males, but rat anatomy isn’t really set up for that to be mutually.

The researchers even kept track of whether the males ejaculated. List of mammals displaying homosexual behavior Giraffes in Kenya; giraffes have been called "especially gay " for engaging in male-male sexual behavior more often than male-female (heterosexual) sex.

The results showed that rats who grew up for those first 60 days with sisters were less likely to mount than the ones who grew up with brothers. Rats live only about two or three years, so it was possible for the researchers to track their sexual development from birth to death.

Send to Kindle. [1][2] This is a list of animals for which there is documented evidence of homosexual behavior.