Lucy Cooke is the author of
The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife. From the transcript of her interview with NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro:
GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right. Now we're going to get to the nitty-gritty. I want to talk about penguin sex.
(LAUGHTER)
COOKE: Be warned. Be warned, listeners. Yeah. Well, I mean, penguins are one of those creatures that have been totally misunderstood. We always think of them as being great parents, monogamous...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right.
COOKE: ...Fantastically faithful. The movie "March Of The Penguins" has much to blame, actually, because the thing about penguins is these are birds with tiny brains. They live in a very harsh environment. It's brutal living in the Antarctic. And so they are flooded with hormones that make them basically have sex with anything that moves and quite a few things that don't move, like dead penguins, for instance. So, you know, they...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right. I didn't see that in the "March of the Penguins" or in the many other penguin movies I've seen. Why is it? That seems so strange to me.
COOKE: Yeah, they left out the pathologically unpleasant necrophiliacs from the lineup. So the males are basically...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue
Lucy Cooke is the author of The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife. From the transcript of her interview with NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro: