Latest Female Stories

U.S. scientists looking at adaptation and survival in a wild population found guppies can adapt to new surroundings in just a few years. A research team led by Swanne Gordon from the University of California-Riverside found guppy populations introduced into new habitats developed new and advantageous traits in just a few years. Gordon and colleagues studied 200 guppies that had been taken from the Yarra River in Trinidad and introduced into two different environments in the nearby Damier...

Whether baby lizards will turn out to be male or female is a more complicated question than scientists would have ever guessed, according to a new report published online on June 4th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. The study shows that for at least one lizard species, egg size matters."We were astonished," said Richard Shine of the University of Sydney. "Our studies on small alpine lizards have revealed another influence on lizard sex: the size of the egg. Big...

Study finds guppies adapt to new surroundings in just a few yearsWhat's the secret to surviving during times of environmental change? Evolve"¦quickly.A new article in The American Naturalist finds that guppy populations introduced into new habitats developed new and advantageous traits in just a few years. This is one of only a few studies to look at adaptation and survival in a wild population.A research team led by Swanne Pamela Gordon from the University of California, Riverside studied...

A researcher at Ohio State University says he is working on producing larger bluegill by breeding super males with two Y chromosomes.The male bluegill are about twice as big as females and thus more profitable for fish farmers, The Columbus Dispatch reported Sunday.Han-Pin Wang, a researcher in the Ohio State aquaculture lab, uses a method based on the genetic difference between males and females. Like humans, male bluegill normally have an XY chromosome pair while females have XX.Wang gives...

Most animals, like humans, have separate sexes "” they are born, live out their lives and reproduce as one sex or the other. However, some animals live as one sex in part of their lifetime and then switch to the other sex, a phenomenon called sequential hermaphroditism. What remains a puzzle, according to Yale scientists, is why the phenomenon is so rare, since their analysis shows the biological "costs" of changing sexes rarely outweigh the advantages.A report by Yale scientists...

"Every sperm is sacred. Every sperm is great. If a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate," goes the song from Monty Python's movie The Meaning of Life. If the lyrics strike you as funny, it's most likely because calling a sperm cell "sacred" sounds ridiculous when men can produce so many of them. In fact, the average male will produce roughly 525 billion sperm cells over a lifetime and shed at least one billion of them per month. A healthy adult male can...