The Feminist's Salmon

In 2015, Austin-based conspiracist Alex Jones took a break from musing about weather weapons and teenagers faking their own school shootings with a rare bit of bipartisan outrage on something, it felt at the time, we could all get behind: water pollution.

“Tap water is a gay bomb, baby!” he declared on Youtube. “I don’t like ’em putting chemicals in the water that turn the freakin’ frogs gay!”

The clip went viral for a lot of reasons: it was funny, absurd, weirdly musical — Jones’s gravelly voice rising almost to a falsetto; the galloping anapestic rhythm of the punchline that recalled a bit of Romantic poetry. But there was also something in it that felt like a bit of prophetic truth, a line that prefigured the modern panic over PFAS: the observation that chemicals in the water were messing with core parts of the natural world.

But what are the core parts of the natural world? As it turns out, we should be very suspicious when nature seems to neatly reinforce our prejudices, as researchers Ambika Kamath and Melina Packer argue in Feminism in the Wild: How Human Biases Shape Our Understanding of Animal Behavior, their new book out from MIT Press. In that book, which we’re running an exclusive excerpt of below, Kamath and Packer argue that queer theory and feminism — at their core, ways of rethinking the unquestioned assumptions of the society we live in — are invaluable tools in doing good science.

In their deep dive into gender-queering among salmon and frogs, they highlight a crucial challenge of doing scientific research: that we do it as human beings, enmeshed in human cares, human cultures and weighed down by human prejudice. And that by opening up our preconceptions, we can begin to see the wonder of a natural world that is, in every sense of the word, far queerer than we may expect.

Welcome to Heat Death, the newsletter that understands that frogs put in boxes will do their best to jump out. Stay with us. 

Animals, Two Ways 

Ambika and Melina here.

Imagine standing by a stream somewhere in North America’s Pacific Northwest, bending your heads over the water to watch some Coho salmon. You don’t yet know much about these fish, but you can start to describe what you observe: the fish’s morphology (what they look like and how their bodies are structured), and their behaviors. 

One of the fishes is a bit bigger than the others, with a wide strip of bright red running down the length of their flank and a large, curved snout, colored jet black except for a distinct white stripe. This fish swims toward another fish, whose back is a silvery brown speckled with black, and whose sides are blotched with fainter patches of red. The second fish sometimes flashes yellow while flipping on their side, and thrashes their tail vigorously along the riverbed—they appear to be digging. In time, other fish swim nearer to these ones—some larger and more brightly colored, others smaller and duller. The fish swim closer to and farther from one another. There’s more digging. Eventually the fish release clouds of milky liquid into the water, their mouths agape as they do so. With so many fish in view, it’s hard for us observers to know precisely which of the fish have just released their eggs and sperm into the water.

We’re watching Coho salmon group sex, and it seems to be a pretty complicated affair.

The one fish who we saw digging in the riverbed is also the one who releases eggs—for now, let’s call her a female. The fish who release sperm (males, for now) can be divided into two types. The bigger, redder fish with the larger, black, hooked noses are known, straightforwardly, as “hooknoses,” while the smaller, silvery-brown fish are known as “jacks.” To categorize Coho salmon into females and two types of males, and to describe their interactions, is to begin answering the questions “who are these fish?” and “what are they doing?” However, the answers to these questions do not yet constitute what many people would think of as a complete scientific understanding of Coho salmon behavior, because they do not include an explanation for why these fish behave in the ways they do.

In a scientific paper published in 2005, an animal behavior scientist named Jason Watters proposed one such explanation. In Watters’s telling, female Coho salmon prefer their eggs to be fertilized by sperm from jacks, and behave in ways that make such fertilizations more likely. Females’ mating preferences thus bring about the jacks’ reproductive success, which is a key component of fitness. However, in seeking out the jacks, females end up being unable to avoid the hooknoses, who are larger and more aggressive than the jacks. Being smaller, the jacks cannot do much to fight against the hooknoses, but they can do their best to release their sperm when the females release their eggs, even if there also happens to be a hooknose around, releasing his sperm too. In this story, the jacks are described as “cooperators” and the hooknoses are described as “coercers.”

It turns out that Watters’s description of Coho salmon mating behavior is unusual. In most of the stories told about how male animals compete for opportunities to mate, the little guys are not the females’ preferred mates—the big guys are. In the more familiar story about Coho salmon too, the big guys win, mostly. Typically, hooknoses are described as fighters, who compete hard against other hooknoses, biting at their rivals and chasing them away from the female as she digs her nest and prepares to release her eggs. The jacks, by contrast, are more often described as sneakers, weaseling their way into mating interactions between females and hooknoses. And one can see how the jacks’ less vivid coloration—and how they hang back in the shadows while the hooknoses fight among themselves — might reinforce the impression that the jacks are sneaky.

So we have here two very different potential explanations for what you might see in that northwestern stream. And the stark difference between the two stories revolves around female agency and choice—do the females want to mate with the jacks, or with the hooknoses? 

The answer to this question places the two types of males in different light: if the females prefer jacks, the hooknoses are coercive. If the females prefer hooknoses, the jacks are sneaky. Of these two stories, the latter is far more widely accepted, and continues to be the main story told by most animal behavior scientists studying Coho salmon. And which stories scientists tell about Coho salmon mating matters to how humans monitor and manage these fish’s populations. When jacks are thought of as sneaky, their contributions to the reproductive dynamics of Coho salmon populations are readily disregarded: scientists tend to undercount jacks, or fail to monitor them at all. In hatcheries, jacks are sometimes excluded from mating altogether. But it would be much harder to overlook the jacks if they were seen as the females’ preferred mates.

You might think that data on these fish’s actual behavior ought to rule in favor of one story over the other, and at first, that seems possible. For example, Watters documented Coho Salmon females digging more (in preparation for laying their eggs) when they’re interacting with jacks than with hooknoses, and spending more time releasing their eggs when there’s a jack in the group of males releasing sperm, compared to a group made up of only hooknoses. One could interpret that as females investing more into reproduction when jacks are around, meaning that females prefer jacks. 

But equally, one can interpret these data as being consistent with the more mainstream story, that females prefer hooknoses. Maybe females dig more when jacks are around because they’re biding their time, waiting for a hooknose to show up. And maybe they release more eggs when a jack is nearby as something of a throwaway: yes, the female cannot prevent a jack’s sperm from fertilizing some of her eggs, but by releasing more eggs, she can do her best to ensure that a larger number of her eggs will nonetheless be fertilized by hooknose sperm. 

Other data are also equally consistent with both stories. For instance, females spend a majority of their time in proximity to hooknoses, not jacks, which could equally mean that the hooknoses are females’ preferred mates or that hooknoses are coercive harassers whom the females cannot escape. So while one might imagine that data would rule definitively in favor of one hypothesis or another—that is how science is supposed to work, after all—in fact it’s easy to interpret many different details to support either story.

Now, if you know anything about salmon, you might find yourself saying, “But we know that the mainstream story is true! We’ve known this for years, there’s so much research supporting it, and the extent of Watters’s evidence is tiny in comparison!” Consider, however, that if the mainstream story is the only story that scientists have seriously considered so far, even the existence of vast amounts of research on that story doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s true. Prior to Watters’s 2005 study, the possibility that Coho salmon jacks might not be sneakers seems never to have been seriously considered. Even after 2005, researchers have not directly addressed the question of which of these two stories is “more” true, and the mainstream story has persisted as the accepted explanation for how Coho salmon mate. We can’t yet say whether jacks are sneaky or not, because most research on Coho salmon simply assumes they are sneaky. When our certainty about the prevailing story depends on never having seriously considered other possibilities, how certain can we actually be?

The point here, of course, is not to adjudicate which specific story about salmon mating is the “most correct.” The point isn’t even about Coho salmon —  or any specific animal. Rather, the point is that, within the realm of animal behavior science, it is possible to tell very different stories about what animals are doing and why. Allowing for a multitude of stories rapidly expands the horizons of our scientific imaginations, encouraging us to consider what the prevailing stories might be taking for granted. And this is crucial because the stories told by scientists shape scientific imaginations and realities. They determine the questions that scientists think are interesting, the research that they try to get funded, the experiments they design, the data they collect, how they interpret the data, and what conclusions they reach—conclusions which scientists then communicate in books, podcasts, and articles as truth and fact. And when much or all of the research on, say, Coho salmon mating dynamics has been conducted from within the intellectual, imagined world created by a single narrative, then it becomes very difficult to know whether that particular story is actually an illuminating way of describing that behavior. 

In other words: when we tell just one story, we don’t know what we don’t know. 

In fact, while the two stories about Coho salmon are starkly different from one another in some ways, in other ways they are quite similar. Both are rooted in the assumption that males compete for mates, and that females have a single preference for one one kind, with the other somehow acting in opposition to their desires. But we could  imagine a third — or fourth or fifth —description of Coho salmon mating, in which competing males and uniform female tastes aren’t assumed. In doing so, scientists might move away from wondering about the relative reproductive success of jacks and hooknoses or asking how they compete, and instead wonder whether there are lots of different ways to be a salmon who is mostly okay at surviving and reproducing. Scientists might search for stories in which different females prefer different types of males, or simply have no discernible preference at all. Scientists might accept that females are perfectly okay mating with multiple males of either type, with no explanations of coercion or sneaking required. They might stop thinking of jacks and hooknoses as two types of males, and instead start thinking of Coho salmon as having three sexes. 

Crucially, to get comfortable with this multitude of possibilities is to let go of the idea that there is a single, “true” scientific story about any given animal.

It may seem antithetical to the notion of science to make room for multiple interpretive stories about the same observations of nature, without then trying to ascertain which story is right and which is wrong. After all, isn’t the point of science to get us ever closer to understanding what is objectively true about the world? Can multiple scientific truths about ostensibly the same thing really coexist? 

A feminist approach to science argues that multiple truths not only can but must exist. In our book, Feminism in the Wild: How Human Biases Shape Our Understanding of Animal Behavior, we explore a plethora of narratives that interpret animal behavior in many different ways that align with different political perspectives. We find that, rather than searching for a singular truth, the most rigorous way to understand the world is to regard it through many different lenses and to hold, all together, the many different views of the world that result. 

Crucially, feminist perspectives on science insist that scientists must become curious about the entanglements of scientific stories with the human contexts in which they’re constructed. They also demand that we interrogate the material effects and political stakes of endorsing one scientific story over another. We might, for example, examine changing descriptions of male Coho salmon reproductive strategies in light of evolving ideas of masculinity in the late twentieth-century United States. In doing so, scientists would avoid reinforcing the cultural belief that gender nonconforming displays of masculinity (and femininity) among humans are somehow “unnatural.” 

The feminist re-imaginings of animal behavior science we describe are multifaceted, messy, and full of contradictions, which isn’t quite compatible with what many people believe science is or needs to be. But this approach to scientific inquiry is a more honest and accurate reflection of the messiness of life, and moreover, is one that respects different ways of being, without casting some as “natural” and others as “unnatural”. Feminism in the Wild contends that engaging in such expansive inquiries will bring us closer to understanding animals than current, mainstream approaches to animal behavior science ever could.

Here’s another example. For the last thirty years or so, well-intentioned toxicologists and environmental scientists have been expressing serious concerns about the harmful effects of chemical pollution on frogs.  At the start of his career, environmental scientist Max Lambert wanted to be part of this effort. “It just so happened,” he told us, “that the chemicals [my supervisor] was looking at…were related to sexual development.”  Lambert did not set out to become a frog sex scientist, but toxicological methods led him there nonetheless. 

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, toxicological research tended to report “sex-reversed” (males who had become females) and “intersex” frogs (individuals with egg-producing cells in their testes, for example) in highly polluted environments, whether simulated in laboratory experiments or found in the wild. Researchers concluded that chemical exposures cause “sex-reversal,” leading to skewed sex ratios — too many females! — in wild frog populations. Other biologists also noted male-male sexual encounters among chemically-exposed frogs (primarily in the laboratory), and interpreted this same-sex sexual behavior as evidence of chemical-induced harm.

Lambert’s 2010s research on American green frogs fit right into this pattern. He found that, in suburban ponds, frog populations had more females than males, compared to the frog populations found in more rural ponds. To a toxicologist, the obvious explanation for this pattern would have been chemicals present in suburban waters. And like others before him, Lambert could have assumed that suburban ponds were more polluted than rural ponds, concluded that chemical pollution was “feminizing” male frogs, and left it at that.

But Lambert didn’t. He noticed that —  although it was true that there were more female frogs in suburban ponds — these ponds actually had less skewed sex ratios than rural ponds. The difference in sex ratios he’d observed stemmed from the fact that rural ponds had, in fact, too many males. 

Why would these different sex ratios come to be? Lambert started to track frog sex ratios at the egg, tadpole, and adult stages in suburban and rural ponds. What he found was entirely unexpected. Regardless of chemical exposure, American green frog tadpoles were “just switching sex pretty much everywhere,” which could lead to the presence of egg-producing cells in testes.  Sex changes at the tadpole stage appeared to result from temperature changes rather than exposure to hormone-interfering chemicals. Frog populations’ “surplus” of females, meanwhile, seemed to have more to do with higher rates of male mortality rather than male-to-female sex changes. What is more, intersex frogs could still produce offspring, contrary to concerned biologists’ claims that the presence of “transgender”  frogs necessarily signaled species decline. 

So as Lambert put it, tadpoles that switch sex are “making it to adulthood, becoming sexually viable, and reproducing successfully. And that’s interesting because a lot of research on…sexual abnormalities suggests those animals are inferior, they can’t mate, no-one wants them, they’re going to be unloved for the rest of their lives. [But] they’re probably actually doing just fine out there and you couldn’t really tell the difference anyway.”

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Lambert, a feminist science studies scholar — none other than Melina, co-author of this book!—was engaged in a queer feminist analysis of the science of toxicology. Melina had become increasingly fascinated, and disturbed, by the unarticulated assumptions that supported both toxicological experimentation and anti-toxics advocacy alike. One particularly present assumption focused on hormone-interfering chemicals and their purported effects on sexualized behaviors. 

The assumption goes like this. Toxicologists assumed that male laboratory rats engage in more “aggressive play” behaviors than their female counterparts because, well, boys will be boys. Toxicologists next determined that a male rat exposed to an estrogenic toxicant had been “feminized” (which the toxicologists interpreted as abnormal and harmed) because he appeared to engage in less aggressive play after being exposed. The extrapolation followed, then, that male humans will be feminized by exposure to estrogenic chemicals, and that this feminization is — naturally — a bad thing.  

But is it? Why were scientists assuming that sex and gender are binary? Why, Melina asked, were they proceeding under the assumption that male = masculine = aggressive, while female = feminine = passive? What does “aggressive play” even mean, and how can one recognize it? How can one generalize from a captive, laboratory rodent’s highly constrained behaviors (not to mention their highly contrived genetics!) to wild rodents, never mind humans? And what’s so threatening about supposedly feminized (human) males anyway, especially if feminization means less aggression?

To be clear, Melina wasn’t arguing that we shouldn’t be concerned about highly toxic substances permeating our environments and harming our health without our consent, all to chemical corporations’ great profit. But she was certain that there had to be a way both to conduct research and express alarm over toxic environmental pollution, all without naturalizing stereotypical and binary human gender roles across different animal species. 

An eventual cross-disciplinary collaboration between Max and Melina—they’re on a first-name basis now—made more explicit the queer approach that Max’s previous research had, in some ways, implicitly adopted. Max had questioned several assumptions that well-meaning biologists had previously left unquestioned, namely: 1.) that queer sex among frogs is unnatural, 2.) that tadpole sex changes are unnatural, and 3.) that intersexed frogs are not only unnatural but also cannot reproduce. In some ways, Max’s earlier research on frog sex was squarely situated within dominant narratives. For example, he used terms such as “demasculinized” frogs, which treats variation in sexual expression as a pathology, and are — unfortunately — standard in his field. But ultimately, Max remained open to alternative possibilities for frog physiology and sexual behavior. 

So what would the queer feminist approach to frog sex be?

For one, it would not immediately assume that changes in frog sex are a bad thing in and of themselves. It would instead work to uncover how chemically polluted waters are actually harming organisms (including the people, animals, and plants who ingest the water through osmosis, drinking, eating, swimming, and more). A queer feminist approach also would not frame chemically-poisoned frogs as pitiable freaks of nature, as well-intentioned scientific and media coverage tends to do. We cannot emphasize enough that a queer feminist approach does not dismiss the reality that chemical exposures are indeed harmful to frogs, and may even harm reproductive health. Indeed, by paying close attention to this very reality, scientists can focus on the effects of toxic chemical exposures that are demonstrably life-threatening (such as DDT’s weakening of raptor egg shells) while linking those chemical exposures to specific chemical manufacturers and specific governments’ lax chemical regulations. 

Scientists taking this queer feminist approach also have reason to renew their attention to animals’ basic biology, asking questions like: how and why does temperature have an effect on tadpole sexual expression? Why are male frog mortality rates higher than those of females? And, given that sex changes don’t necessarily preclude reproduction but might alter it in as-yet-undocumented ways, what are the implications of global warming for frogs thriving well into the future? 

Max’s openness to the messiness of life took him from being someone who uncritically aligned himself with the mainstream scientific story that male frogs are “feminized” by hormone-interfering chemicals to someone who embraces queer feminist possibilities for frog physiology and sexual behavior, and subsequently finds data that support alternative explanations, thus adding to our knowledge of basic biology. It’s this openness to possibility about the natural world that we authors hope you will carry with you as you read this book, and long after. 

As Max put it, “Be open to surprises…biology will surprise you. Let the animals tell you something different about the world than what you thought.” He was talking about frogs, of course. But also about salmon, bighorn sheep, anoles, and the many, many other animals that don’t live quite the way we’d expect them to. 

This piece has been excerpted and adapted from Feminism in the Wild: How Human Biases Shape Our Understanding of Animal Behavior (March 2025, MIT Press). Ambika Kamath can be found at https://ambikamath.com, and Melina Packer at https://melinapacker.com.

That's Heat Death, everybody. We'll be back soon with more interviews and musings on past, future, and all the crises in between. If you enjoy our work, don't forget to subscribe! The more paid memberships we have, the more we can afford to commission longer pieces – something we'd like to do a lot more of.