Latest Mating Stories

Mothers win the genetic tug of war by producing more sons with larger fathers and more daughters with smaller fathers"Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies." Mother Teresa's words echo throughout the world. They ring particularly true in the biological kingdom among brown anole lizards, as evidenced in research detailed in the April 2 edition of the journal Science.Dartmouth researchers Ryan Calsbeek and Bob Cox study male and female brown anole...

The brains of males and females, and how they use them, may be far more different than previously thought, at least in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, according to research funded by the Wellcome Trust.In a paper published today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, researchers from the University of Glasgow and the University of Oxford, have shown that the gene known as 'doublesex' (dsx), which determines the shape and structure of the male and female body in the fruit fly, also sculpts...

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) have discovered that injecting a simple hormone into leeches creates a novel way to study how hormones and the nervous system work together to produce species-specific reproductive behavior.A paper describing the work appears in the March 11 online edition of the journal Current Biology.Daniel Wagenaar, Broad Senior Research Fellow in Brain Circuitry at Caltech and first author...

UC researcher finds that when it comes to hooking up with the opposite sex, genital complexities do matter. Charles Darwin spent eight years studying barnacles and their genitalia. In much less time than that, University of Cincinnati evolutionary biologist Michal Polak (and co-author Arash Rashed, now at the University of California, Berkeley) have confirmed one of Darwin's theories: that genitalia complexities in some male species have developed because they assist the male in "holding her...

Female ducks have evolved an intriguing way to avoid becoming impregnated by undesirable but aggressive males endowed with large corkscrew-shaped penises: vaginas with clockwise spirals that thwart oppositely spiraled males.More details of this evolutionary battle of the sexes fought at the level of genitalia are described by Yale researchers in the December 23 issue of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B."In species where forced copulation is common, males have evolved longer...

Stopping male mosquitoes from sealing their sperm inside females with a 'mating plug' could prevent mosquitoes from reproducing, and offer a potential new way to combat malaria, say scientists publishing new results in PLoS Biology on 22 December.The new study focuses on the species of mosquito primarily responsible for the transmission of malaria in Africa, known as Anopheles gambiae. These mosquitoes mate only once in their lifetime, which means that disrupting the reproductive process...

SUNNYBANK HILLS, Australia, Dec. 9 /PRNewswire/ -- These days, it's common knowledge that one out of every two marriages will end in divorce. And yet, we are still getting married. In some countries such as Australia the number of marriages is actually on the rise. It is understandable that people enter into a serious partnership like marriage with the best of intentions. People actually believe that the fairy tale can be real, that together they'll beat the odds and be part of the 50% of...

Females can be too attractive to the opposite sex "“"“ too attractive for their own good "“"“ say biologists at UC Santa Barbara. They found that, among fruit flies, too much male attention directed toward attractive females leads to smaller families and, ultimately, to a reduced rate of population-wide adaptive evolution.In an article published in the December 8 issue of Public Library of Science Biology, the authors described their experiments on the sex lives of fruit...

New research shows that male suitors of a female cannibalistic spider risk facing a premature death unless they perform an adequate courtship lasting a minimum of 100 minutes. Further, the research shows that "sneaker" males can slip by and mate successfully on the courtship efforts of the hard-working first suitor.Scientists at the University of Toronto Scarborough have published a research paper titled "Female's courtship threshold allows intruding males to mate with reduced...

British scientists say they've found some female insects can control the amount of sperm they store in an effort to select the best father for their young. University of Exeter researchers say their findings represent new evidence to explain how some female insects can influence the father of their offspring, even after mating with up to 10 males. The scientists, led by postdoctoral researcher Amanda Bretman, made the discovery during research involving female crickets, which often mate with...