'And the Daily Telegraph also told a similar tale: "according to scientists", dolphins resort to "rape" to assert authority.
'Other news outlets around the world carried similar reports. Examples: bisexual and exclusively gay dolphins (MSN); male dolphins are bisexual, US scientists claim (Australia's News Ltd); and male bottlenose dolphins engage in extensive bisexuality (ZeeNews, India).
These reports appear to be follow-ups to an article on Discovery.com that said male bottlenose dolphins engaged in extensive bisexuality, combined with periods of exclusive homosexuality.
'The allegation was included in Discovery's otherwise reasonable account of an academic study into the behaviour of 120 or so adult dolphins in Western Australia led by Professor Richard Connor from the University of Massachusetts and Dr Bill Sherwin of the University of New South Wales.
'But the gay-bisexual-rapist dolphin story turns out to be bunkum. According to postings by Sherwin's university colleagues, Rob Brooks (here) and Stephen Hamblin (here), it is due to a misreading of the serious scientific paper by Connor, Sherwin and others called A novel mammalian social structure in Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins: complex male-male alliances in an open social network.
'Brooks writes: "The whole circus arose from a misconstrual of a simple phrase in the paper, 'bisexual philopatry.'"
'He says that Sherwin explained that the bisexual philopatry simply means: "males stay near where they were born, AND females stay near where they were born". Sex, gay, straight or otherwise, is not involved. Nor are the animals rapists.
'Perhaps the dolphins might like to make a formal complaint to the PCC, aka the Pisces Complaints Commission.
'And please, please don't all rush to tell me that dolphins aren't fish.'
Roy Greenslade, Media Guardian.
Tabloid hacks ignorant of the finer points of academic marineology terminology shock!
Anyway, here's Fagburn's indepth analysis of the initial coverage.
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