Measuring up to 13 feet in length and weighing in at up to 1,300 pounds, manatees, also known as sea cows, are known as the gentle, curious, plodding giants of the sea. But they have a wild side. When it comes to sex, manatees party like it’s 1999 and they’re Charlie Sheen. No one has mastered the art of the underwater bisexual rager quite like manatees.
Scientists have been studying manatees for decades. By the 1980s, same-sex behavior was already known to be common among both male and female manatees in the wild. As the biologist Bruce Bagemihl catalogued in his 1999 book Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, manatees “regularly engage in intense homosexual activities” and “most male manatees are probably bisexual” since same-sex behavior tends to occur alongside or following opposite-sex behavior. Among males, this includes mounting, 69ing and, well, sword fighting to the point of climax.
Beforehand, males “kiss” each other “by touching their muzzles at the surface of the water” and also caress and nibble one another. Manatees can also engage in massive same- or -mixed-sex orgies that “can last for hours”. Bagemihl also noted that males spend an average of about 11% of their time in these “cavorting groups”. Averaged out, that’s equivalent to 2.6 hours per day!
In fact, male manatees can go at it so hard that the sex can turn deadly. In 2023, a 38-year-old male manatee named Hugh died at a Florida aquarium after “high-intensity sexual behavior” with another male, which left him with a ripped colon and other traumatic injuries. There’s a South Park episode in there for sure.
As for what motivates same-sex behavior in manatees, the answer could be the standard “social bonding” rationale offered across the animal world, where same-sex behavior is commonplace, but it may also be more pragmatic. In 1979, the marine biologist Daniel Hartman observed a group of male manatees off the Florida coast competing for the attention of a female — “mobbing” her, really. When the female chose her mate, the rest of the males went off and basically had a consolation orgy together, suggesting that one reason for manatee bisexuality, at least on the male side of things, could be as a sexual release when females are unavailable.
Another explanation could simply be that manatees are the sexual honey badgers of the sea who just don’t care. As the professor of veterinary medicine Jenessa Gjeltema told NBC News, “[Manitees are] not too meticulous about who their partners are. They just have this kind of a sexual urge, and then they’ll engage in activity with whomever seems to be in the area”. At the end of the day, you don’t need a reason to love who you love. That’s what sexual freedom is all about.