Prostitution Among Animals

When most of us think of animals, we think of various species which might be similar to us or completely different from us. Many of you probably think about that cute little puppy you have. But very few of us think about the social complexities of the animal world. After all, Humans evolved from the animals itself and us humans are very social. So animals must have these social traits.

Humans have learned many things throughout the evolution and one of the things we learned is trading. But when the trading is done for sex, it is usually called as prostitution. Which is also known as one of the oldest profession in the history of humanity.

Actually, the exact definition of prostitution is "Engaging in sexual activity in exchange for payment of money, goods, and services". Humans engage in such kind of behaviour. But what about animals? Do animals also have similar behaviour?

Many animal scientists studying these animals have found similar traits. Such as in penguins, specially Adélie penguins.

These penguins live in Antarctica. Every year around the end of October, millions of these birds, which spend most of their lives in the ocean move to the rocky soil area for breeding. These Penguins build a nest from stones and pebbles, their nest is higher than the surrounding which protects their chick from hypothermia through melt water and rain. For building the nest they collect stones which are quite rare in the area they live, plus they live in millions.

They often face scarcity of stone. When this problem arrives some penguins were found stealing stones from other penguins and in some cases, it was found that the female Penguins pretending to be single and having sex with other single male penguins for the exchange of stones. In few cases some female penguins were found just flirting with single penguin to get stones. In one case the female penguin collected 62 stones from a single male.

These penguins were not only found prostituting themselves but in many instances they also found male penguins engaging in rape, gang rape, sexual and physical abuse of younger penguins and in necrophilia with penguins some of which had died the previous year. Not all penguins engage in this kind behaviour but very few of them actually do this. This was first discovered by Dr. George Murray Levick in his studies during 1910-1913.

He never published his observations, it felt inappropriate to him to publish this shocking behaviour of penguins. The British scientist wrote his observations only in Greek so that only educated person can understand. Later when fellow scientists found out about his work then it was published in 2012

Similar behaviour was found in insects like the Beetles.

These insects engage in a polyandrous sexual strategy, which means that one female mates with several different males. Usually, the female can get all the sperm from one male what she require for breeding but they still engage in multiple copulation because the male provides goods such as food or water to female. When the resources are scarce they engage in more sexual act with more males. These insect live in very arid environment so they often face dehydration and during the time of extreme condition or draught and female seed beetle were found engaging in more sexual acts to get hydration benefits from male ejaculation. On the other hand male life span observed to be decreasing because of constant mating in benign environment.

But these are all the animals which are completely different from us humans. What about animals which are somewhat similar to us? Such as Monkeys.

When scientists were teaching the concept of money to monkeys to examine their economic strategies, the monkeys started showing the rational economic behaviour like humans do.

They first taught monkeys that they could exchange small metal tokens for piece of food. When monkeys understood this concept. Scientist decided to put them in a market like situation where they had a choice to buy food from different traders for the money they have been given.

When both the trader had the food which monkeys liked equally such as trader-1 had Apple and trader-2 had grapes. Because both were their favourite food, the monkeys spent their money equally on both items. But when the price of the apple was reduced to 2 apples for the same price before the monkeys always bought apples. These monkeys showed some rational human behaviour of buying from one who provided most of the food.

Adding more twist to the situation when trader-1 offered 1 piece of apple and trader-2 offered 2 pieces of apples. Even though trader-2 offered 2 pieces but many times he actually gave only 1 piece instead of 2. The monkey always chose to buy from trader-2 making the better deal from the choices they had.

After completely understanding the concept of money. In one case it was found that the male monkeys started paying money to female monkeys to have sex with them and the female monkeys were observed buying food with that money. That was first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkey kind. This just confirmed scientists that the monkeys completely understood the concept of money.

The monkeys not only stopped with this they also learned Gambling, stealing, unnecessary spending because they never observed saving anything.

This behaviour of animals may not be termed as prostitution in animal world, from human’s perspective it is prostitution but it’s the nature made these animals behave this way. Such as in beetle the only goal of the male is to fertilise as many eggs as possible, probably in case of penguin too. In case of monkeys it is known as basic Behavioural bias. But just the mere introduction of concept of money to these monkeys can invoke many things. Looks like humans as well as some animals are not immune to the effects of money.