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Please dont ban me for this question, This is a serious question. Can fish be homosexual?

Chris

As i understand it Two female oscars will lay eggs and tend to them as if awaiting their birth, ovibiously nothing happens and the eggs are usualy eaten.

as i understand it any creature can be homosexual.

monkeys and other primate often engage in what could be classed as homosexual activity. this does not mean they are necacarily gay, they usualy still have female mates.

correct me if i'm wrong

I believe Bonobos and certain dolphin species are the only animals (excluding humans) that engage in homosexual acts purely for pleasure. Some unisexual species of lizards, such as some of the whiptails of the Southwest, must go through mating rituals (one female mounts another) in order to trigger embryonic development in the animal being mounted. It's intentional, but they do it out of necessity and instict rather than enjoyment.

When animals such as fish do it (for example a male guppy tying to impregnate another male guppy), it is usually just an issue of confusion. Not that they would really care if they did know the other fish was a male, though.

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I'm not your neighbor, you Bakersfield trash.

With all animals it is most likely to occure in a same sex habitat. Like if you had a tank with a bunch of male guppies in it, they would try and mate with each other.

Inky

I'm not sure if this counts but I often questioned the sexuality of my gorgeous Betta Otis (RIP!). Far from being a rough and tough fighting fish ... he was a little bit sensitive!

All I know, is I watched a show about gay goats. Put into a pen with females ready to breed and one other male, they still mounted the male. It was their preference. Anything that can beat out nature and ignore the call of a female anything in "heat" or whatever they call it for goats, has to be something besides mistaken identity or lack of females nearby. They did show by artificial insemination that it wasn't hereditary.

what kind of fish are you asking about? some change sex through the course of their life.

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To date almost all known species of animal have been witnessed to display homosexual tendancies in certain individuals, where the conditions of sexuality actually allow them to be so. There are of course self dividing, and parthenogenic animals where homosexuality is of no relevance. Few animals are commonly homosexual though, and behaviour that is thought of as homosexual can simply be dominance behaviour.Female dogs will for example "hump" one another, and this can be purely inspired by rank order.Some species of reptile when incubated in the egg outside of normal tolerance ranges can have females that act like males due to hormone imbalance. Most species however will not display homosexuality with any regularity, and the reception this behaviour gets by members of the same species is not normally welcome, and is found to say the least a bit confusing if not downright aggressive, and it can often be a source of conflict.

Fish with similar hormone patterns from different geographic areas kept in the same aquarium will sometimes unwittingly trigger sexual responses in another species, and some species are so promiscuous as to try to mate even with unrelated specimens of either sex. Frogs in particular have been known to grasp fish during amplexus, and actually drown them. Binobos, men, and dogs are among the few species, (mostly large mammals) that will practice homosexuality regularly, and it is a by product of our years of evolution as intensely social species. The homosexual activity level generally increases with the extent of social behaviour in any species. To understand homosexuality in animals takes a knowledge of origin, social communication, sexual dominance, and the oddity factor, and/or social stresses. Most animals do not make informed choices about their sexuality and work on principles laid down over thousands of generations of advantageous behaviour. Unproductive sexual relations in animals are rare because those with the homosexual proclivity typically fail to breed, thus not passing the trait onwards, unless there is an advanced social system at work where homosexuality is of advantage , either by bonding, or co-operative working to raise offspring, as per ourselves and binobos. Its not unheard of , but its unusual.

It comes as a shock to may people that animals can be homosexual, and many people assume humans are the only ones that do it. Under certain circumstances however it can happen with most species, even discounting the occurances of mistaken identity, and sexual aggression. Homosexuality is by no means an unnatural phenomenon , its completely natural under certain conditions, the trait can be genetically inherited or learned, even become an acquired taste if you will.There are also documented occurrances where it appears that is more likely under high populations with complex social behaviour and limited resources. Some animals even practise abstinence and help kin to raise young, with the genetic code of the youngsters being so similar to their own as makes no difference. This can be common among certain species of bird.Nature favours the breeder over the homosexual however , and to that end bi-sexual behaviour is more likely to occur than true homosexuality, something that applies to our species as equally as it does to other higher mammals.

Survival takes all types, although we as humans beings with our higher level of self awareness and the advantages of technology may always be e to over the top self-diagnosis about such things. I think its probably less of an issue for the rest of the animal kingdom, unless of course you were trying to start a breeding colony, in which case, it must be most frustrating!

I used to have a pair of homosexual female CT Betta splendens... I witnessed 11 of their little 'embraces'... I probably missed a lot more...

my female mollys love to be together all the time, i put a male in the tank for a month and nothin happend not even one pregnecy. i have lesbein mollys.

I recall an interesting experiment involving rats.

Place them in an environment where they have no restraints upon food availability, but where there are restrictions on space, and quite a few of the male rats will begin developing quasi-female characteristics and even begin offering themselves up as mates in a female fashion.

I suspect that the same phenomenon applies to our fishes - food in abundance but crowded living quarters leading to an inbuilt mechanism to control population kicking in.

It has relevance in the human world too. I suspect that if you checked out the incidence of homosexuality in humans, it would be much more prominent in densely populated urban areas than among thinly spread populations of humans in rural expanses. Don't forget we now have six billion people on the planet, and that in some parts of the world they are very densely packed ...

In the case of several of our fishes, twin female spawns are noted (particularly among Cichlids) as a means of dealing with eggs that have ripened without the presence of a male to fertilise them the usual way. Angelfishes are notable for exhibiting this behaviour.


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Yep, this happens with lizards, even fruitflies and some frogs.Some species have even learned this behaviour as a way to subvert the designs of more dominant males to give themselves a breeding opportunity outside of the usual rank structure. Its fascinating stuff really, and so much of it applies to humans too!