The horrified record of “depraved, hooligan” male penguins breeding in Antarctica that were suppressed for nearly 100 years have finally been published, with a dose of 21st century realism.

“They’re hard-wired to breed,” Douglas Russell of London’s Natural History Museum said in explaining what had shocked Dr. George Levick back in 1910.

To the eyes of a 34-year-old Edwardian gentleman, thousands of “hooligan” male Adélie penguins of Cape Adare were copulating with each other or with dead females, gang-raping injured females and molesting or beating up young chicks.

So shocked was Levick that the four pages about “The sexual habits of the Adélie penguins” were cut from his final 1915 book and stamped “Not for publication.” Some had been transcribed in Greek to limit readership.

Russell, a curator of eggs in the museum’s department of zoology bird group, had been studying old scientific papers when those three words “sort of caught my eye.”

He knew the context and Levick’s published work. One 1915 review had praised Levick’s ability to open the world of “these strange, erect, manlike little birds.”

“The general public is still quite keen to anthropomorphize now as they were then,” Russell said. “Penguins are bipedal.”

Wrote Levick in his published work: “The crimes which they commit are such as to find no place in this book, but it is interesting indeed to note that when nature intends them to find employment, these birds, like men, degenerate in idleness.”

Indeed, he described unpaired male penguins who “congregate in little hooligan bands and hang about the outskirts of the knolls, whose inhabitants they annoy by their constant acts of depravity.”

In fact, said Russell, there was nothing unusual about mating season in Cape Adare.

“Breeding colonies can be very dangerous places.”

From a deserted and frozen landscape, the cape in a matter of days would be thronged with 200,000 penguins intent on breeding. Most would pair up but the increasingly frantic singleton males would mate with anything that looked vaguely like a female assuming a traditional position for sex — be it a dead penguin or a rock.

Chicks could be collateral damage in the frenzy, Russell said. Plus, male and female penguins are hard to tell apart, even for penguins.

And as even Levick observed: “owning to the low temperatures, these bodies are preserved in good condition, several years passing before they lose their fresh appearance.”

So, “their behaviour was not analogous to necrophilia. They are not attracted to the dead. They are attracted to the position,” said Russell.

With winter bearing down, Antarctic penguins “have a very brief window of opportunity” to breed, Russell said. “Although it may seem a waste, mating with a dead female or mating with a rock, all opportunities are taken, as it were, within the colony.”

Levick was a pioneer of Adélie penguin biology who gave future scientists the benefit of the first full season of observation. He observed and wrote down everything even when “he was at a loss to describe it,” said Russell.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“Depraved was the only word he had to describe what he saw. But there are no depraved penguins.”

How might the world be a different place if Edwardian Britain had read his full account of sex and the single penguin?

“It might have stimulated people, and I use the term advisedly, to focus on sexual behaviours. We have the benefit of more freedom now to discuss these things.”