The Queer Life of a Cockchafer

How did two beetles cause a gay panic?  There's much more to a cockchafer or ‘maybug’ than meets the eye. 

Join ecologist, Connor Butler, to find out more about what these charismatic creatures can teach us about science, humanity and the fluidity of the natural world. 

Discover more:  
  
You can find out more about Connor’s work and the queer ecology walks here: https://www.connorbutler.co.uk/ 

To visit Osterley Park and House and gardens, or to find out more about its spectacular grounds, find out more here: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/london/osterley-park-and-house 

Further reading:  

This is a HUGE topic of which we’ve only scratched the surface. As part of our research and if you wanted to dig a little deeper, we read: 

Of Maybugs and Men: A History and Philosophy of the Sciences of Homosexuality by Pieter R. Adriaens and Andreas De Block 

and 

Biological Exuberance by Bruce Baghemil 

Special thanks to Laine Kaplan-Levenson from A Field Guide to Gay Animals for taking the time to speak with us while we developed the episode.  

[Ad] Wild Tales is sponsored by Cotswold Outdoor, your outside retailer and epic guides to adventure.   
Quick breathers, calming walks or heart-pounding hikes. We feel better when we get out more.   
Find quality kit and 50 years of outdoor wisdom. Plus, supporters save 15% in-store and online. Feel in your element, in the elements, at Cotswold Outdoor.   
https://www.cotswoldoutdoor.com/  
  
Production:   

Host: Rosie Holdsworth   
Producer: Marnie Woodmeade  
Sound Designer: Jesus Gomez  
  
Follow Wild Tales on your favourite podcast app or on Instagram @wildtalesnt. If you'd like to get in touch with feedback, or have a story connected to our wild world, you can contact us at [e-mail] 

Episode Transcript

CONNOR BUTLER (00:35):
Historically, when people would see beetles
mating with each other, they'doften assume that there would be
a male and a female.
But actually, what thesescientists then did was prove,
if you take a closer look, it'soften not the case, we can't
presume, we shouldn't presumewhat we know about nature
because nature doesn't followour rules.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH (00:57):
Hello, I'm Ranger Rosie Holdsworth, and
today we're looking for a beetlewhose flaps caused a flap in
entomology and how projectingsociety onto science has shaped
our understanding of the naturalworld.
Can we ever let bugs be bugs?
Welcome to Wild Tales, the queerlife of a cockchafer.

CONNOR BUTLER (01:22):
So today I am walking around Osterley Park.
It's a beautiful day. Becausenow is the perfect time to try
and find some insects.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH (01:34):
This is Connor Butler, an ecologist and
entomologist. He spends his daystracking down bugs and teaching
others about their weird andwonderful nature.

CONNOR BUTLER (01:46):
The reason I love insects so much is firstly
because they are everywhere.
The good thing about that isthat you're never bored in life.
You can always find insects.
And there's something aboutlooking for things that are
small and hidden that kind ofmakes them feel a bit like
treasure.
They're so pretty when you lookat them up close.
It's interesting to me thatthese beetles are so, so

(02:10):
brightly colored, dung beetlesespecially, they live their life
in animal poo, and yet so manyof them are these metallic blues
and greens.
Why did they evolve this amazingcolour? It's bizarre to me.
That's kind of why I like them.They just sort of defy
expectations of what normalityis.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH (02:31):
Standing under the shade of a huge gnarled oak
tree, Connor inspects the leavesof a lush green canopy, the
veins shining through itscloud-shaped leaves.

CONNOR BUTLER (02:46):
And what I'm looking for right now is any
damage, any bite marks thatcould have been done by insects.
And I've seen a few leaves,they've got these big chunks
taken out of and what I'm reallylooking for is a really special
beetle called a cockchafer.
And what they're doing isthey're feeding on leaves of
trees.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH (03:09):
The cockchafer goes by many names, a June bug,
a May bug, or a doodlebug fortheir loud and clumsy flight.

CONNOR BUTLER (03:17):
I call them Cockchafers.
So cockchafer, the first part ofthe word means something that's
big, kind of very mighty cosit's quite a big beetle.
And chafer comes from the oldword for chewing, because all
beetles have these chewing mouthparts.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH (03:33):
The life cycle of this bug is extraordinary.
They spend 3 to 4 yearsunderground as grubs munching on
roots before metamorphosing likea butterfly, sometimes in their
thousands into their adultforms, but they also have
another claim to fame.

CONNOR BUTLER (03:49):
Cockchafers were the first ever species of animal
to be illustrated depictingsame-sex sexual behavior.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH (04:00):
Same-sex mating in animals has been
documented for hundreds ofyears, but studying this
behaviour has always come upagainst a problem. Us.
Some people refer to this asDarwin's paradox. If sex isn't
for reproduction, we dismiss it.
This is what makes the 1896illustration of the cockchafer

(04:20):
so special, but it was not asimple journey to get there. It
took entomologists six decadesto create this image.
In 1834, an entomologist andschoolteacher, August Kelch,
came across two matingCockchafers whilst wandering in
a forest in Germany, but henoticed something.

CONNOR BUTLER (04:40):
So the way you can actually determine what sex
a beetle is, for Cockchafers isyou count the number of flaps on
their antennae, and males havegot 7 flaps and females have got
6.
And when this Germanentomologist looked at these two
beetles, he realized that theyboth had 7 flaps, they were both
male.
And so he was very confused whythese two male beetles were

(05:01):
reproducing or attempting toreproduce with each other.
And so he thought that it wasprobably a dominance thing,
because the male Europeancockchafer is much bigger than
the forest cockchafer.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH (05:15):
The mating was dismissed, but the sightings
keep happening in a lemon grovein France, in fireflies dancing
above a pond, and more and morefrequently in the laboratory of
entomologists.
But it isn't until 1896 that penis put to paper.

CONNOR BUTLER (05:33):
There's a French entomologist called Henri
Gardeau de Kerville, and he doesthe first ever illustration of
these beetles. He draws two maleCockchafers mating each other.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH (05:45):
It's a delicate diagram of two beetles
linked by their perineum, whichlooks like a stinger.

CONNOR BUTLER (05:51):
And when he published this, it was really
controversial because of courseit shows something that was
considered to be kind ofunnatural, and a lot of people
were very negative towards this.
But he said it was so commonthat it kind of showed that
there was this intrinsic natureof these beetles to do this.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH (06:12):
This conclusion began a decades-long
argument between entomologists.On one side, Henri Gardeau de
Kerville argued that someCockchafers were doing it by
preference.
On the other, a French physicianand neurologist, Charles Fére,
insisted that the hot-bloodedmales were tricked into
unnatural acts by misleadingpheromones.

(06:35):
This long argument didn't reallyteach us anything definitive
about Cockchafers. We stilldon't know why some of them
choose to mate with other males,but it did teach us a lot about
humanity.

CONNOR BUTLER (06:50):
Now what's really interesting about the case of
the cockchafer is that that kindof bias in society, we're always
trying to justify why somethingis doing something.
So if we see two male beetlesattempting to mate with each
other, we're always trying toexplain away that it could be
something that is homosexual,and we don't of course, we don't

(07:11):
know with nature.
But by trying to say that it's adominance thing, or it's an
aggression thing kind of-
It's quite a closed-mindedapproach, I think.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH (07:23):
This'explain the gay away' is a common
phenomenon in natural history,but in many cases, research was
buried completely.
It's difficult to know exactlyhow much research has been
hidden, suppressed, or ignored,but as recently as the 1980s,
Doctor Janet Mann witnessed "More gay sex than imaginable"
amongst dolphins, but delayedthe publishing of her findings,

(07:46):
fearful of being pigeonholed andfearful of the misrepresentation
of her research.

CONNOR BUTLER (07:53):
Imagine if you were in the 1890s and you see
this drawing of these two maleCockchafers mating with each
other.
It was kind of the first timethat the idea of homosexuality
being something that was naturalwas brought into science. And so
it was really controversial, butalso I think it was probably

(08:15):
quite powerful for a lot ofpeople to see themselves, yeah,
reflected in nature.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH (08:20):
Seeing same-sex behaviour in nature was
and still can be revolutionary.After hearing about the first
discovery of male Cockchafersmating in Germany, Karl Heinrich
Ulrichs, one of the earliestadvocates for LGBTQ + rights,

wrote in 1879 (08:36):
"
Sexual orientation is a rightestablished by nature.
Legislators have no right toveto nature, no right to
persecute nature in the courseof its work, no right to torture
living creatures who are subjectto those drives nature gave
them. The battle against natureis a hopeless one."

(09:00):
That's a really good quote onmany levels, like, it's a good
quote.
Science is meant to beobjective, to give us the facts,
but in reality, our science isinfluenced by society.
From the lack of research onwomen's health to ignoring sex
for pleasure in dolphins, ourscience has bias.

(09:20):
Naturalists have long warnedagainst anthropomorphizing
animals. The natural worldfollows different rules to our
own.
Yet it's something we do timeand time again, unconsciously
and unquestioningly. So ourscience continues to reflect our
societal values, whatever theymight be.
And although our society haschanged and is still changing,

(09:43):
there remains some evidence ofthe bias we saw 100 years ago.

CONNOR BUTLER (09:47):
Earlier last year, there was a case of two
humpback whales that were foundmating with each other and it
was the first time humpbackwhales had ever been
photographed mating.
And it turned out that actuallythere were two male humpback
whales. And of course, there wasa lot of controversy, a lot of
people were saying, oh, it'sjust a dominance thing, it's an

(10:09):
aggression thing.
But really, we can never knowand that's kind of the whole
point.
We see homosexual activity innature, it's really common. If
you ever raised chickens orstudied insects, it's really
common to see same-sex couplesand same-sex matings.
And so all we can say is itexists in nature. We don't

(10:29):
necessarily need to justify whyit's happened because we'll
never really know.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH (10:33):
We see in the headlines from time to time, gay
penguin dads, gay dolphins, apanic about mushrooms changing
sex but the truth is that theseheadlines obscure something
vital.
Sex and gender in nature is morediverse, more expansive and far
more fluid than we could everimagine. It's our assumptions

(10:54):
about nature that can limit ourunderstanding.

CONNOR BUTLER (10:56):
Queer ecology is trying to unlearn a lot of that.
And the more we learn aboutnature, the more we realize that
it's incredibly diverse. Itdoesn't follow all the rules of
society, it doesn't follow thebinaries, it's really fluid.
And I think from that we canthen look at ourselves and

(11:16):
realize that actually, we're allpart of nature and our fluidity
is also part of nature.
And I think that when you thenstart to question those things,
you look at nature verydifferently.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH (11:29):
For hundreds of years, members of the LGBTQ +
community have been told thatsomething about them is
unnatural.
And looking at bugs may not havethe answer to a societal
problem, but Connor knows firsthand the impact it can have.

CONNOR BUTLER (11:44):
So I do a lot of queer ecology walks where I take
people out into nature and Ilook at plants and animals that
have kind of unconventional lifecycles.
And what I found reallyinteresting is that people find
it cathartic to see lots ofplants and animals with these
really diverse life cycles,whether or not they're asexual,
if it's a bird that has the samesexual pairings, if it's a

(12:09):
woodlouse that is changing sexor a tree that is changing sex,
and people like to seethemselves reflected in nature.
It's a hard thing growing up ifyou're a queer person,
especially in today's society. Imean, it's always been hard, but
It's good to have people thatare connected to to nature.
But it's a slippery slope aswell, because there's also lots

(12:29):
of really horrible things innature.
There's parasitism, there'smurder, there's things eating
each other. So really, weshouldn't try and use nature as
the basis for what we think isright or moral, and actually
should just do what we as humansthink is right, which is that
everyone should be accepted tobe who they are and just be

(12:49):
themselves.
So as much as you want to takeaway from insects and we see
these same-sex matings, at theend of the day, we're all just
trying to get through life andhopefully flip over some logs
and see some nice bugs now andagain.

ROSIE HOLDSWORTH (13:12):
Thanks for joining me in this wild tale. Do
you have an amazing story aboutthe natural world? I'd love to
hear from you. You can find uson Instagram @wildtalesNT where
you'll also find behind thescenes moments, nature's giants,
and the micro wonders that makeour world the place it is.
Use the hashtag#Wildtaleswednesdays, or email

(13:34):
podcasts at nationaltrust.org.ukto send us pictures and stories
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Did you know we also do videopodcasts. They can be found on

(13:56):
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While you're there, why notcheck out our history show back
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See you next time.