NEWSPAPER QUOTE: Date: 7/13/1999 7:53:32 PM Central Daylight Time
Practicing Penguin Prostitutes?

CAMBRIDGE, England -- Researcher  Dr. Fiona Hunter has studied penguins' mating habits for more than five years. She claims some females may allow male strangers to mate with them in exchange for nest-building stones, thus providing what she concluded to be the first observed animal prostitution. Dr. Hunter said all activity was performed in the
absence of the female's regular mate, and occasionally, after the sex act, gratified males gave the females additional stones as sort of a tip.
END OF NEWSPAPER ARTICLE

The above story is very interesting. And it reminds me of a "no shitter" from one of my many trips to the ice. It is very difficult to determine the sex of an Adelie penguin. Even the penguins don't know for sure. A penguin knows what he or she is but can't tell what the other guy is. That's why they go around dropping rocks in front of each other. Sometimes they have even been know to drop rocks in front of Sailors. I knew a Seabee at Hallett Station who would get rocks dropped in front of him when he was working in the heavy equipment bone yard. He would go ballistic when an Adelie dropped a rock in his direction. He would throw hammers, wrenches, or whatever at the penguin.
Then he would get in trouble for disturbing a protected species. 
Hallett Station was located right in the middle of a huge Adelie rookery. One day my friend was chasing one of the rock droppers and he came upon several USARPs who were in the process of studying the mating habits of the Adelie penguin. However, the scientists had not been able to accurately determine the sex of the birds that they were gathering statistics on. The Seabee made a great contribution to science by telling the SARPs that he could tell the difference between male and female, but the SARPs just scoffed at him and heaped scorn upon this simple peon. A greasy handed Seabee who couldn't possibly know anything that they didn't already know. The Seabee told the SARPs that the females were the ones with the muddy footprints on their backs. This information revolutionized the penguin mating habit study. The Seabee was never given any credit for the great discovery, but the SARP in charge of the team had a mountain peak in the Pensacola Mountains named in his honor. The seabee went on to winter-over three times and all he eve received for his contribution to science was a silver clasp on his ice ribbon and a case of Old Bavarian goober beer. However, after several years of study it was proven that the Seabees observation was not 100 percent foolproof. It turned out that there is a .001 percent occurrence of homosexuality in the male Adelie Penguin, so muddy footprints on the back does not always mean that it is a female. The Seabee should have suspected the queer connection when he was the target of the faggot penguins in the bone yard (pun intended). 

That's it for now.

Nogard Rellik, OAE, OBM, DKS, LSMFT!
(translation of bonafides on request)