Gay Swans Find Love With 3D-Printed Eggs

A pair of male black swans at the Melbourne Zoo have hooked up and appear to be ready to commit. After they built a nest together (with very tasteful decor), zoo caretakers deployed a 3D printer to create a clutch of faux eggs for the boys to bond over.

“This is something we do see in wild swans,” a Zoos Victoria bird keeper named Ben explained in a Facebook video. “Two boys can pair up. This got the bird team thinking about ways we can provide an opportunity to have reproductive behavior as part of their behavioral repertoire.”

The swans – named Billy and Elliot, after the film “Billy Elliot,” in which a young boy from a working-class family becomes a ballet dancer and eventually plays the Swan in “Swan Lake” – showed immediate interest in the fake eggs, although neither went so far as to sit on them.

Among black swans (Cygnus atratus), male-male pairings are fairly common – and they make great parents. A female will sometimes associate with the lads, mate with one or both of them, and leave her eggs. Then the men step up: “A full 80-percent of the gay couples successfully fledge their young, compared with 30 percent for straight couples,” according to genderinclusivebiology.com (we’re not making that website up).

“They didn't sit on them this year,” Ben says of Billy and Elliot, “so it’s something we’re still going to keep working on and we’re definitely going to offer it to them again next season.”

We’ll defer to the experts here, but it seems somewhat cruel to entice the boys to sit on eggs that will never hatch. Maybe they should bring in a deadbeat mom to lay them and leave?

You can see the swans – and the making of the eggs – here.

Photo credit: Melbourne Zoo