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I’ve used the All Blacks throughout, but they’ll actually in white today.

Their kit will also feature a poppy for Armistice Day.

33 Tests: NZ 31 wins, two draws.

Draws: 0–0 (1964); 25–25 (1983).

Previous game: Scotland 17–25 NZ in 2025.

Scotland levelled at 17–17 before a late McKenzie try.

Last four margins: 8, 5, 8, 8 points.

Scotland: 10 Glasgow starters.

Russell winning cap 96; Beauden Barrett cap 148.

Will Jordan: six tries in three Nations Championship games.

NZ won all three July Nations Championship games.

Both teams second in their hemisphere standings entering round four.

Rennie replaced Townsend as Glasgow coach in 2017.

Former Scotland captain Mike Blair now coaches the All Blacks attack.

New Zealand wearing white, with black armbands.

Scotland still seeking their first-ever victory over NZ.

Moscow used 172 drones and 36 ballistic missiles in attacks on electricity substations and bridge over the Dnipro

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Russia of trying to “plunge Kyiv and the entire country into a blackout”, after a major attack overnight on energy infrastructure in the capital and a bridge over the Dnipro River.

Ukraine’s president said Moscow’s preparations for peace talks next week involved pummelling a city of millions with ballistic missiles.

The ‘secretary of war’ and his shameful history are facing bipartisan scrutiny

Can you smell the schadenfreude in the air?

Watching some of the worst people in the world get their comeuppance this week has been deeply satisfying. And the show isn’t over yet. While the midterms have wrapped up, the blame game is only just getting started, with Republicans desperate to find scapegoats for their shellacking.

Arwa Mahadwi is a Guardian columnist

Lawyers say they found multiple instances where US translation created more serious legal accusations against James ‘Fergie’ Chambers

Attorneys for jailed wealthy leftwing donor James “Fergie” Chambers accused the Trump administration of making “malicious” and “bad faith” changes to legally required translations from English to Spanish in its extradition request to Spain, adding words like “violent”, “detonate” and “fires” that are not in the original text.

Chambers’ legal team also identified multiple instances where the US translation from English to Spanish created more serious legal accusations against Chambers than were indicated in the original text for his alleged involvement in paying the legal fees of activists who participated in a 2023 protest against Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems.

Adults complain and say kids should occupy more space in the world. Then when they do, the world tells them to quiet down

On the Maine island where I live, childhood ends when you’re old enough to catch the 7.15am ferry to school.

We live year-round on Peaks Island, a small island accessible only by boat about 3 miles off the coast of Portland. There is an elementary school here, but no middle or high school. So, once island children reach sixth grade, they begin commuting to the mainland by ferry. In many ways, it is a rite of passage.

Arutemu has added a photo to the pool:

Sergiy Galyonkin has added a photo to the pool:

The timber facade of the former Kurumasa Inn at the Historical Village of Hokkaido, Sapporo, Japan. July 2026.

Today's links

• JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine's "Against Tech Oligarchy": Inventing a new labor playbook for a unique and powerful industry.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: EMI x Gnutella; ETCON photos; Piracy loss claims are "self-serving hyperbole"; Shareholder supremacy let Google conquer and enshittify the world; Cat causes kernel panic; HK erupts; National Guard x 1 weed plant; Enshittification of labor.
• Upcoming appearances: Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Santa Barbara, Montreal.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine's "Against Tech Oligarchy" (permalink)

JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine are veterans of a string of hard-fought unionization drives at tech workplaces that started with some astounding successes but ran up against ferocious resistance in the second Trump term; their book about tech labor, Against Tech Oligarchy, is a superb analysis of the challenges and potential for tech labor organizing:

https://againsttecholigarchy.com/

For decades, tech workers enjoyed extraordinary power, despite the fact that virtually no tech workers were in unions. That's because tech workers were both extremely valuable to their employers (each engineer hired by a Silicon Valley firm added about $1m to the company's bottom line) and extremely scarce.

This won tech workers very favorable working conditions, high compensation, and a great deal of control over their employers' products (because if a worker refused to work on a project, it was hard to find someone else to do the work). What's more, there has always been a sizable cohort of tech workers whose own lives were profoundly improved by access to digital networks and wanted more than anything to distribute those benefits to everyone else. I call these workers "Tron-pilled," because they fought for the user:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/11/obvious-terrible-ideas/#bayesian-terrorism

During the era of tech worker scarcity, few tech workers saw themselves as workers at all – rather, the tech worker's self-conception was as an entrepreneur in waiting, a temporarily embarrassed founder. Tech bosses played on this perception, promoting the idea of tech workers and managers as peers and/or family members. Tech CEOs affected hoodies and jeans and hosted company-wide meetings where they allowed engineers to pepper them with impertinent questions about the company's technical and commercial direction.

But scarcity-based power only lasts until supply catches up with demand. As the number of workers outstripped the number of jobs, bosses showed their true colors. That's what happened at Kickstarter, when one of the bosses forced out his co-founders and declared himself CEO and proceeded to override the decisions of the company's Trust and Safety team. This sparked one of tech's first unionization drives, and it was a bitter fight, with management pulling out every dirty tactic in the union-busting playbook:

https://kickstarterunited.org/oral-history/

The labor militancy at Kickstarter United wasn't an isolated incident. Workers at much bigger companies like Google and Microsoft had a long tradition of pushing back against management through internal channels, open letters, and, starting in 2018, mass walkouts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Google_walkouts

But post-Trump, bosses at these companies were much less willing to countenance dissent, and waves of vicious retaliation and reprisals radicalized many workers at these companies, driving them to more traditional, organized forms of labor activism. At the same time, workers at smaller, "mission-driven" shops like Bandcamp were inspired by the success of Kickstarter United and they started their own drives. All this attracted the interest of the "internationals" – big, established unions like the Communications Workers of America – who trained union organizers at all kinds of tech shops and started laying the groundwork for traditional union drives.

Most of Against Tech Oligarchy tells the story of these drives in a gripping you-are-there style (it helps that both of the authors are veterans of several of these campaigns). The stakes get much higher during the pandemic, of course, as tech comes to play a more central role in the lives of hundreds of millions of locked-down workers, and as the tech companies themselves went on uncontrolled hiring sprees, putting workers on the payroll without any duties or responsibilities, often just to ensure that a rival company couldn't hire them.

The pandemic also prompted many tech bosses to express far more worker-hostile sentiments than they'd ever let slip in public before. Fully remote workforces both frustrated tech bosses and also significantly reduced the opportunities for in-person labor organizing. All of this built to a series of rising crescendos, such as Musk's Twitter takeover and mass layoffs, and Israel's tech-fueled genocide in Gaza. Confrontations between tech workers and bosses grew more bitter and direct, even as solidarity between white-collar tech workers and their blue-collar peers (notably Amazon warehouse workers) increased.

If all Against Tech Oligarchy did was lay out the cut-and-thrust of these labor struggles during these momentous years, it would be worth the price of admission. But it's in the final chapters that the book really distinguishes itself, because it's here that the authors embark on a pitiless postmortem of their own failed campaigns and the failures of their peers and ask themselves what it will take to unionize tech workers.

They start with the observation that most American union organizing is built around maintaining "labor peace" (by swiftly moving to recognition and a contract) but that tech bosses are ready to wage "labor war" (through illegal union-busting and retaliation). A labor peace strategy avoids costly and dangerous risks to established unions, such as decertification of locals and expensive and bruising court battles. But for tech bosses, labor war pays off, because their workforce is transient, fragmented, and skeptical of the very idea that they are workers. They have little to no experience with unions and can barely imagine how a union might improve their working lives.

The traditional labor playbook calls for workers to quietly build their power, taking no overt action while conducting a series of personal, one-to-one conversations that contribute to an eventual quorum of workers that's large enough to win a unionization vote. This strategy is like building a bonfire, where the pieces of fuel are piled one atop the other, but not lit until the pile is done.

But in a tech shop where workers turn over frequently and work in isolated teams, often from home, this strategy fails. Workers who have been won to the union side leave or grow demoralized in their isolation. Reaching new workers is difficult, and since the whole union drive occurs in secret, new workers don't know to reach out to organizers in their shops.

For Tan and Redwine, this fact militates for a strategy that revives some of the pre-labor activism of tech workers, noisy public/private fights whenever product decisions and management conduct violates some mix of worker rights and workers' values. They see this as a way to build momentum within a shop, bringing workers off the sidelines and giving organizers chances to bring those workers into a sustained, structured labor drive.

Tan and Redwine see tech worker organizing as the frontrunners of an age of new labor militancy and labor war, of the sort that pre-dated the labor peace that arose after the passage of the National Labor Relations Act. That labor peace was the result of bosses learning that hardball tactics would be met with equally hardcore responses.

This is especially important for tech workers, whose strikes cannot inflict the same pain on their bosses as earlier industrial workers' strikes did. Digital systems are designed to operate themselves after their are built, so when the workers involved in those systems withdraw their labor, the systems continue to run, often for a very long time, before needing maintenance (this is also the lesson of Musk's mass layoffs at Twitter).

Tech bosses have metabolized this lesson, and they are increasingly willing to wage all-out war at the first sign of labor unrest, with waves of retaliatory firings. These bosses have figured out devilish tactics for constructive dismissal, like the CEO of Mapbox, who retaliated against union supporters by targeting them with "return to office" mandates that forced them to report in person to offices that were in distant states. This prompted many of these workers to quit, which spared Mapbox from even paying them a severance package.

Against this backdrop, strikes need to be seen not as a way to bring the business operations to a halt, but rather as a way to galvanize workers and bring them into the union drive. As New York Times Tech Guild organizer John Cruickshank put it, Action builds capacity for action.

This is the ethos of the Microsoft workers who have campaigned tirelessly to halt the company's participation in the genocide in Gaza. They barricaded themselves in executives' offices, livestreaming the confrontation; they disrupted Microsoft's livecast 50th anniversary celebration; and they paddled a flotilla of protest kayaks outside of top Microsoft executives' waterfront homes. All of this paid off, with Microsoft halting sales of its tools to a particularly notorious unit of the Israeli military who had been using the company's products to conduct surveillance in Gaza and the West Bank.

Tan and Redwine see these novel tactics as a rewilding of the labor movement, a return to the militant roots that led to the labor peace, but only after all-out labor war. They cite the 1934 Minneapolis truck drivers' strike, where workers invented the "flying picket" by swarming scab trucks far from the factory gates, defeating the trucks' police protection, which led to a general strike and a total victory for labor.

This is important historical context. The genteel business of getting everyone's cards signed and having the NLRB certify your union was the compromise bosses agreed to after they learned that the alternative was far worse for them. Today, it's not just bosses who've forgotten that lesson – many workers have, too. Against Tech Oligarchy aims to rekindle those old boilers and get the unstoppable labor train running again.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Text Watermarking https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2026/08/24/Text-Watermarking

• Every Past and Tomorrow: The Physical Landscape of AI https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stephenvoss/every-past-and-tomorrow-a-survey-of-virginia-data-centers

• Reflecting on Digital Rights Wins and Losses in Sacramento https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/11/reflecting-digital-rights-wins-and-losses-sacramento

• Join EFF to Celebrate the Life of Aaron Swartz https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/11/join-eff-celebrate-life-aaron-swartz

• Goodbye from Salon https://www.salon.com/2026/11/05/goodbye-from-salon/

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago EMI will distribute music on Gnutella

#25yrsago Photos from O'Reilly P2P Con https://web.archive.org/web/20011124163254/http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2001/11/05/monday_photos.html

#20yrsago Aussie Institute of Criminology calls piracy losses “self-serving hyperbole” https://web.archive.org/web/20061208043648/http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,20713160^15306^^nbv^,00.html

#20yrsago UK airport cop: gun-shaped shirt decoration is illegal https://memex.craphound.com/2006/11/07/uk-airport-cop-gun-shaped-shirt-decoration-is-illegal/

#15yrsago Bug report: “Simultaneous cat and external keyboard input causing kernel panic” https://web.archive.org/web/20120112020023/https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/11/3/110

#10yrsago Hong Kong erupts after Beijing refuses to allow dissident lawmakers to re-take oath https://globalvoices.org/2016/11/06/street-protests-as-beijing-preempts-hong-kong-courts-with-new-interpretation-of-basic-law/

#10yrsago “Massive scale” shut-down of polling places in districts known for suppressing Black voters https://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/11/04/voting-rights-protections-gutted-polling-places-shuttered-massive-scale

#10yrsago Donald Trump’s campaign takes away his right to tweet without supervision https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/07/us/politics/donald-trump-presidential-race.html?_r=1

#10yrsago National Guard helicopter, 7 cop cars sent to warrantlessly seize a single marijuana plant from an 81-year-old grandmother https://www.loweringthebar.net/2016/11/national-guard-one-plant.html

#5yrsago Bait and Switch https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/07/bait-and-switch/

#1yrago The enshittification of labor https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/07/postwar-social-contract/#a-defense-of-social-contracts

#1yrago The 40-year economic mistake that let Google conquer (and enshittify) the world https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/06/vertical-blinds/#invest-dont-acquire

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
  https://kilkenomics.com/

• Courtenay: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
  https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

• Folkestone Writers Festival, Nov 16
  https://www.creativefolkestone.org.uk/whats-on/cory-doctorow-the-internet-is-broken-now-what/

• Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23
  https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html

• Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
  https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation

• Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28
  https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/

• Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
  https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/

• Santa Barbara: UCSB Reads, Apr 29
  https://www.library.ucsb.edu/events-exhibitions/ucsb-reads-2027-presents-author-cory-doctorow

• Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
  https://montreal2027.ca/en

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Clint Eastwood (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/NoGodsNoMayors/posts/clint-eastwood-173008088

• Life After AI (Brain Bar)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI

• Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
  https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8

• AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
  AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/

• AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
  https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/

Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 532 (33976 total).

• "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that drew a blank, felt the squeeze, played the queen, and made donkey-bull love.

First, scientists shed new light on how Earth ended up losing more than a billion years of its geological record, a puzzle that has resisted explanation for decades. Then: octopuses in tight spots, a topless spear-brandishing Celt, and a tale of unlikely tail.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter The BeX Files. 

“Blank Space” (Earth’s Version)

Dhungana, Santosh and Flament, Nicolas. “The deep Earth origin of the Great Unconformity. Nature.

Earth doesn’t trouble itself too much with keeping intact archives. With its tectonic activity and erosive forces, our planet is constantly wiping out huge chunks of its own memory, creating gaps in the geological record called unconformities. 

The Great Unconformity, the largest gap of this kind, reveals that Earth straight-up deleted more than a billion years of strata, for reasons that remain hotly debated and mysterious. Sandstone that dates back to the Cambrian period some 538 million years is often found directly on top of ancient “basement” rocks that date back anywhere from 1.2 billion to 1.8 billion years ago. This missing layer shows up around the world, hinting that it was erased by a global event.  

Now, scientists have placed the origins of the Great Unconformity deep inside Earth’s mantle, during the tectonic tumult of supercontinent breakup.

“The cause or causes of the Great Unconformity are unknown,” said authors Santosh Dhungana and Nicolas Flament of the University of Wollongong. “The proposed mechanisms include extensive glacial erosion during Snowball Earth (about 720–635 million years ago), rifting and plume activity, sea-level fall and mantle-driven dynamic topography.” 

“These processes have not been dynamically tested, with limited comparison between global models and global datasets to explain the spatial distribution of the Great Unconformity,” the team added. 

To fill the knowledge gap about the geological gap, the researchers ran models of the formation and breakup of ancient supercontinents during the eons preceding the Cambrian period, when complex life rapidly proliferated in Earth’s seas. Massive landmasses were pushed upward by motions in Earth’s mantle during this time. Exposed to erosive forces such as weather, glaciers, and eventually oceans, they became sanded down over time, creating the vast void. 

“Our models explain why the Great Unconformity is best preserved in North America and show that it is a first-order surface expression of deep geodynamic processes that transformed global landscapes and sediment fluxes,” the team concluded.

Scientists will no doubt continue to debate the cause of this planet-wide memory lapse, but there is consensus that the same mechanisms also set the stage for the emergence of complex life during the Cambrian. No matter what caused the Great Unconformity, we partly owe our existence to it today. 

In other news…

Putting the squeeze on octopuses   

Xin, Wenci et al. “Overcoming environmental constraints: octopus uses 3-step or 4-step strategies to squeeze through small holes.” Journal of Experimental Biology.

We’ll move now from massive gaps in Earth’s memory to tiny gaps that octopuses can somehow squeeze through. These tentacled escape artists can famously maneuver their way through passages that seem impossibly small relative to their bodies, an ability that has spawned a subgenre of viral videos.

Now, scientists have discovered the secrets of “octopus-squeezing behavior” by observing two species—the common octopus (Octopus vulgaris) and the Mayan octopus (Octopus maya)—navigating small holes in laboratory containers. 

“Our study demonstrates that octopuses employ two primary strategies, 3-step and 4-step, for squeezing through narrow spaces,” said researchers led by Wenci Xin of the National University of Singapore. “The key distinction between these strategies lies in whether the body is squeezed separately from the arms.” 

The first two steps were probing the aperture and then shifting a few arms through it. Navigating the tightest spaces required breaking up the final passage into two parts: Pulling the remaining arms to the other side, and then compressing the mantle behind the head so they could fit through last.

In addition to documenting these amazing feats of flexibility in nature, the study is the perfect excuse to revisit the classic X-Files episode “Squeeze.”

A queen hidden in plain sight?  

Russell, Miles. “Verica Rex: Searching for a ‘lost’ queen of the British Iron Age.” Current Archaeology.

When Rome invaded Britain 2,000 years ago, they had the help of an inside man—or was it an inside woman? In a new article, an archaeologist makes the case that the British king Verica, who aided the Roman invasion of their own homeland, was actually a queen that has been misgendered lo these many centuries. 

Miles Russell of Bournemouth University argues that Verica was a woman based in part on the leader’s Latin name, which ends in the suffix “a” which is common for women, as opposed to names ending in “-us” for men. 

Coins also depict Verica using “slender, bare-breasted equestrian figures that appear irrefutably female in contrast to the overtly masculine warriors on the issues of Iron Age rulers like Tasciovanus and Caratacus,” according to Russell. 

Many experts are not convinced that the evidence points to a secret ancient queen, and Verica’s gender is likely to inspire much more debate. Wikipedia, our great public arbiter, has not changed Verica’s male pronouns. 

Women leaders weren’t unheard of in Celtic Britain, as evidenced by the queens Cartimandua and Boudica, who lived in the same century as Verica. Regardless of whether Verica was among their ranks, this leader was a consequential figure in the Roman takeover of Britain. 

Achille and Patroclo: More than friends  

Da Cruz, André B et al. “A socio-sexual bond between a bull and a male donkey.” Current Biology.

Scientists who were conducting fieldwork on monkeys in Ethiopia serendipitously stumbled upon a very different discovery—a tender same-sex relationship between a bull and a donkey.

Achille, a bull, and Patroclo, a donkey, belong to different owners, but they graze together by day. Despite the availability of other males and females in their pasture, this pair has developed a strong socio-sexual bond that includes nuzzling, licking, and Achille sexually mounting Patroclo.

“Patroclo frequently presented his hindquarters toward Achille and nipped him,” said  researchers led by André Beirão da Cruz of the University of Pisa. “In the only two instances in which Achille approached and mounted another male donkey, this individual showed clear avoidance behaviours and displayed threatening facial expressions (e.g. ear flattening), which were never observed in Patroclo during the 51 mountings (34 with intromission) with Achille.”

Same-sex sexual behavior is extremely common in nature and has a wide variety of possible explanations, including social cohesion, mistaken identity, or lack of access to opposite-sex mates. But what Achille and Patroclo have is special. Despite being different species and having alternate mating options, the pair share a highly selective and reciprocal social and sexual bond. 

“Although interpreting this behaviour is challenging, the mounting attempts, taken together with the repeated and mutual affiliative interactions between the two animals, may signal the quality of their relationship” and “the strength of the animals’ social bond,” the team concluded.

In addition to this heartwarming tale, the study goes to show that you never know what you might find when you chase your goals. The researchers were there to watch geladas, but it turned out those primates weren’t the only animals monkeying around.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.