Bitch: On the Female of the Species

by Lucy Cooke

A foraging lifestyle makes it much harder for males to restrict females’ movements and access to resources, as they are able to source their own. Once females were restricted in their activities and males gained control of high-quality foodstuffs, like meat, females lost agency and became sexual property. Paternity became an issue, as property was inherited, and patriarchy took hold. The evolution of the capacity for language allowed males to consolidate and increase their control over females because it enabled the creation and propagation of ideologies of male dominance/female subordinance and male supremacy/female inferiority.

‘There was an old German professor who stood up and said’ – de Waal adopts an incensed tone – ‘“What is wrong with those males?” I explained there’s nothing wrong with them. They have a good life. They have a lot of sex and I don’t see what’s wrong with them. But he was really worried about them.’

Their story shows us that males are not genetically programmed to aggressively dominate females. Their ability to do so depends on environmental and social factors. The key ingredient for female empowerment is the strength of the sisterhood, from family to friends, to overthrow an oppressive patriarchy and foster a more egalitarian society. Parish agrees. ‘We have a lot to learn from bonobo females. The feminist movement argues that if you behave with unrelated females as if they are your sisters, you can gain power. The bonobos show us that that’s true. It gives us a lot of hope.’

It is telling that Rowell chose to disguise her sex by signing her published papers inconspicuously as T. E. Rowell, but this simple disguise still caused issues. In 1961 she submitted a paper to the Zoological Society of London Journal. The society was impressed and invited T. E. Rowell to come down from Cambridge and give a talk to the fellows; but when it was discovered that T. E. Rowell was, in fact, a woman, there was some embarrassment. She was able to give the lecture but not to sit with the fellows for dinner because of her sex. The solution was to ask her to sit behind a curtain, out of sight, and eat her meal. Needless to say, she declined

Killer whales, Orcinus orca, are the most pumped-up member of the dolphin family and, like their smaller squeaky cousins, they’re highly social creatures with the smarts to match. Their whopping seven-kilo brain has more surface area for complex thought processes like language, social cognition and sensory perception than any other animal on the planet.

Menopause is extremely rare in the animal kingdom. Theoretically, it shouldn’t exist at all. Natural selection takes a pretty merciless view of a loss of fertility. And with good reason. If the purpose of survival is reproduction, then there is no reason for an animal to stay alive when it can no longer parcel its genes in a neat fleshy package for the next generation.

As such, we humans have long been considered menopausal freaks. Until recently, the only mammals we knew of to live beyond their fertility were in captivity.

Of the five thousand species of mammal, the only ones we now know to go through menopause naturally in the wild are the four species of toothed whale – and human beings.1

No other mammal known to science maintains lifetime contact between mothers and offspring of both sexes.There is always a bias towards dispersal of one sex, and typically, in social mammals, it’s the sons that leave. Some of these orca matrilines contained up to four generations of male and female orcas. Could this unique structure have something to do with the female’s exceptional post-reproductive lifespan?

The human menopause puzzle has generated dozens of theories and decades of debate. A popular explanation says that a post-menopausal woman, like those zoo-dwelling gorillas, has simply outlived her ovaries thanks to modern medicine; implying that menopause isn’t really natural and women should bow out gracefully at around fifty along with our fertility. Thankfully, the existence of menopause in hunter-gatherer societies puts paid to that theory.

It states that female menopause is the evolutionary upshot of the human male’s preference for younger females. The trio of male scientists from McMaster University in Ontario that proposed this profoundly dispiriting theory back in 2013 supported it with some snazzy mathematical modelling demonstrating how the male penchant for young skirt results in the build-up of deleterious mutations, causing older females’ ovaries (if not their hopes and dreams) to shrivel up and die before the rest of them. At the other end of the spectrum is the more enduring, and significantly more feminist-friendly, ‘grandmother hypothesis’. Proposed in 1998, it posits that females who step out of the reproductive rat race mid-life and focus their energies on supporting their children (and grandchildren), instead of squeezing out yet more babies, significantly increase their offspring’s chances of survival and, in turn, their own genetic legacy.

In fact, I’ve been told it is quite the reverse: post-menopausal female orcas have a decidedly cougar-like sex life and are often seen soliciting eager young pubescent males for sex. Trawling through more than forty years of underwater footage, field notes and photo IDs of dorsal fins, Croft and his team did discover that the post-menopausal females were more often than not the ones swimming at the front of the pod, guiding their family to the best foraging grounds, especially when food was in short supply.

These particular orca races are known to ecologists as eco-species, as they’re the same species but inhabit a specific geography and do not interbreed. More than that, they are known to ‘speak’ their own dialects and their specialist hunting techniques, passed down from generation to generation, have been compared to culture.

When the fish are in short supply, only killer whales with years of experience know how to find them – and those are the oldest matriarchs.

phenomenal photographic memories: remembering testing patterns after twenty-five years. Not only are these wise old-lady whales a living library of ecological and cultural knowledge, they’re also incredibly benevolent: ‘You’ll see a sixty-year-old female catching a salmon, breaking it in two and then giving half to her thirty-year-old son. It’s incredible,

Despite the tough name, male killer whales are, according to whale experts, ‘massive mummy’s boys’. They spend most of their lives swimming a few feet from mum’s side but, significantly, her hunting handouts help keep them alive. Croft’s team discovered that if a male orca’s mother died before his thirtieth birthday, he was three times more likely to die the next year.

Elephant matriarchs are some of the most formidable females on the planet. They are the chiefs of their family group, carrying the wisdom to outwit lions, form political alliances with other female elephants, and remember ancient water sources during times of drought. These charismatic giants have much in common with killer whales (and indeed humans)

Mothers are therefore always more related to their pod than their daughters and granddaughters are. This asymmetry of relatedness promotes conflict between female generations breeding at the same time. Natural selection will favour young mothers, who have less stake in the success of the wider group, who aggressively compete for limited resources.

This social cost to late motherhood provides the evolutionary impetus for a female orca to stop breeding mid-life so she can invest in her sons and grandsons and stop competing with her daughters and granddaughters.

Trawling the ocean for the right kind of turd may not be everyone’s ideal job, but Giles wouldn’t be doing anything else.

The most heartbreaking loss was a newborn calf that had made global news after its mother, Tahlequah, carried her dead body around for seventeen days. The world’s media speculated whether or not this young mother could be mourning; to Giles it was obvious. ‘I find it insulting that we would assume she wasn’t grieving,’ she told me. ‘These orcas are very much like us, but, quite honestly, I think they are better than us. They’ve got parts of their brains that we don’t even have.’

2.6 times the volume you’d expect from a mammal their size

She told me this so-called paralimbic lobe is only found in dolphins and whales. It provides dense connections between the two neighbouring areas of the brain and suggests that orcas could be processing emotions in a way we cannot comprehend.

The reason the southern residents were so massively plundered by marine parks is that when one animal was caught, its family would remain by its side and could be added to the catch with tragic ease. ‘They’re perfectly capable of scooting it out of there,’ Marino told me, ‘but leaving the group is unthinkable for them.’

‘They’ve got a whole ocean to swim in and yet they’re swimming not just next to each other, but touching each other.’ If you live in a vast, featureless three-dimensional space like the ocean, daily travelling great depths and distances, there is no such thing as a home to where you can retreat every day, to connect with loved ones and feel secure. Your family group are your home, your safe space and the key to your survival. So it pays for orcas to stay close and connected, in ways that we perhaps cannot comprehend. They certainly display extraordinary levels of social support, including babysitting for each other’s calves and caring for disabled individuals.

Most of the time we think of culture as conferring huge advantages, but the southern residents are teaching us the risk of cultural conservatism. In this rapidly changing world it pays to be opportunistic or you can end up in a dead end. What’s urgently needed is for one of the emerging matriarchs to be an innovator,

It is not unusual for pubescent sons to have their first sexual experience with their mothers or elderly matriarchs. And males are known to engage in ‘sword fighting’ with other males. Whether

The EQ of female sperm whales is more than double that of males (1.28 for females versus just 0.56 for males). This extraordinary degree of dimorphism is unique amongst mammals. And, as with the orcas, it is thought to be connected to the female’s increased need for social intelligence. Male sperm whales are solitary creatures, whereas females live in large families in which social interactions and inter-individual communication are essential. When it is time for courtship, one can only imagine how limiting a female sperm whale must find conversation with the male.

kept aloft by oceanic updraughts for thousands of kilometres whilst barely twitching a wing. Albatross can spend literally years at sea, their webbed feet never touching the ground, making these marathon mariners sacred to sailors, poets and myth-makers alike.

Albatrosses live for sixty to seventy years and typically mate with the same bird every year, for life. Their ‘divorce rate’, as biologists call it, is among the lowest of any bird.

What no one, least of all Bush, knew at the time was over a third of those committed couples were, to put it anthropomorphically, lesbians.

So, these pioneering lesbians, forging new colonies on fresh higher ground, are literally preserving their species. If science can remove its hetero-biased goggles for just a moment and take a fresh look at other species in which the sexes are identical and there is, perhaps, a shortage of males, we may find other examples of pioneering female cooperative breeders.

Not because of any glue-like substance, but nano-scale fibrils that exchange electrical charges with whatever they touch, causing them to stick, a system so effective that NASA are co-opting it to develop ‘astronaut anchors’ that allow robots to adhere to the exterior of space stations when conducting repairs.

It is truly mind-boggling to think, but the global population of Lepidodactylus lugubris, which must be many, many millions, are all clones of just a handful of original mothers. Their global reach and resilience as a species beg the question, why bother with sex at all? This has been dubbed the ‘queen of questions’, and is, perhaps, the greatest riddle in evolutionary biology.

Some species of cabbage aphid, for instance, like Brevicoryne brassicae, can produce up to forty-one generations in a single season. So, one female hatched at the start of summer could theoretically produce hundreds of billions of descendants, were it not for ladybirds gobbling them up.2

Your average sexual species is around one or two million years old. Asexual species, on the other hand, rarely get to celebrate beyond their one hundred thousandth birthday. Or, at least, that’s the theory. The trouble is there are a bunch of all-female species that have flagrantly ignored their shelf-life predictions. These ‘evolutionary scoundrels’, as the legendary biologist John Maynard Smith has described them, have caused no end of scientific fluster, calling into question the whole question of sex.

The reason for the evolutionary longevity of the bdelloid (pronounced with a silent b) is an area of continuing investigation and furious deliberation among scientists. However, one of the secrets to their success seems to be that they ‘steal’ genes from other lifeforms, possibly through the stuff that they eat.