It's OK to be gay, especially if you're a bird

New research, being published in an upcoming issue of the journal Animal Science, states that homosexuality can assist birds in many instances.

LiveScience reports that it can actually be beneficial for birds.“In some cases, homosexual alliances may even be adaptive, helping individuals defend territories, advance their social status, or get help with parental care.” Geoff MacFarlane, a biologist from the University of Newcastle in Australia, has found that homosexual behavior is harmless for the evolution of birds as there are plenty of reproductive opportunities available to them. He said, "That's quite different to what the traditional argument is in the literature, where homosexual behavior is seen as a cost." Homosexuality occurs in over 130 species of birds, of the more than 10, 000 in existence today. In 2007 MacFarlane discovered that male homosexuality occurred more often in polygynous (a male with multiple female partners) species and female homosexuality occurred more often in monogamous species. From this study, he later hypothesized that a bird was more promiscuous if they spend less time with their young. He set out to see if this was true with homosexuality in birds. MacFarlane and his team of researchers found that there was a strong correlation between parenting and the amount of sex the bird was getting. “Whichever sex did less parenting also typically did more same-sex canoodling, basically because they could,” LiveScience reported. Sure enough, they did find that it was likely to be true for males in polygynous species and females in monogamous species. So far, they haven’t found cases of female homosexuality in the few species where the female birds have many male partners - though MacFarlane predicts it may still happen. MacFarlane plans on extending the study to primates to see if they display the same behavior as birds