Female adolescent macaques practice sex by mounting male deer

Visitors to the Minoo reserve in Japan's Osaka prefecture have long observed female adolescent macaques mounting and humping adult male deer; in a fascinating paper (Sci-Hub open access link) in Archives of Sexual Behavior, three psychology researchers from the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, conduct a careful study of these behaviors ("the first quantitative study of heterospecific sexual behavior between a non-human primate and a non-primate species"), and, through a set of naturally occurring experiments, formed an evidence-supported picture of what's going on here. (more…)