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Tag: "mating" at biology news

Study investigates 'divorce' among Galapagos seabirds

...vide some meals to the fledgling. So, if, when mating season rolls around again, a male looks a little r...es are probably never permanently in or out of the mating game, in contrast to many other animals, she said. A male Nazca booby cast off by a current mate m...

CU study reveals why starling females cheat

...ugh other species of birds appear to adopt similar mating strategies. "This is the first study to show th... mates and see that they have different extra-pair mating strategies," said Rubenstein. "It adds a whole new layer of complexity to the story."...

Electric fish conduct electric duets in aquatic courtship

...ses based on sex. They video recorded four pair of mating mormyrids (a feat in itself, since the species rarely breeds successfully in captivity) and identified nine common motor displays and 11 specific pulse sequences common to courtship and mating. "Knowing the electrical and motor patterns during cou...

Philandering female felines forgo fidelity

...b were fathered by more than one male, revealing a mating system that deviates from those used by other carn...cture that emerges is that of wide-ranging females mating with a number of males, which could be an advantage in terms of helping to maintain genetic diversit...

'Insulator' helps silence genes in dormant herpes virus

... found in both yeast and chicken, namely the yeast mating loci and chicken globin locus. To see if insulators play a role in silencing viral genes during the latent phase, Zhou and his group studied cells infected with HSV-1. The studies showed that during a latent period, the virus binds to a host prote...

Flies don't buzz about aimlessly!

...ermittent searchers include octopi, graylings, and mating crickets. Andy Reynolds says, "Our results with freely flying Drosophila appear to be the first reported example of searching behaviour that is both scale-free and intermittent. This suggests that these behaviours are not part of two different se...

Male owls pitch their hoots to advertise body weight to competitors

...ales use these quality cues when they choose their mating partner." "The vocal communication of owls has interesting similarities to that of terrestrial mammals where the information is typically encoded in acoustic components of the calls rather than in the diversity of the vocal repertoire as it is in son...

Male-killing bacteria makes female butterflies more promiscuous

... some populations of tropical butterfly the entire mating system is determined by a group of bacteria known ... to know what the effect of the bacteria is on the mating system, and here we've shown that butterfly mating patterns are strongly determined by the killer ba...

The penalty of having a sister -- why sibling sex matters for male saiga antelopes

...and face strong male-male competition during short mating seasons. This means that size matters for males - being smaller than average is one of the major limiting factors for reproductive success. Aline Kühl from Imperial College London's Division of Biology, lead author of the paper, explains that al...

Female chimps keep the bullies at bay

...se with fewer females in estrous at the same time, mating competition between males intensifies. As a result, there is an increased probability that high-ranking males, with desirable social and physical attributes, will mate with the fertile females. These sought-after characteristics could be inherited ...

Tracking sperm whales and jumbo squid

... the central Gulf of California where spawning and mating of these animals probably take place." Electronic tags The MEPS study was conducted in fall 2004 near Santa Rosalia, a coastal Baja California town that is the center of Mexico’s jumbo squid fishery. During six days at sea, the research t...

Female Antarctic seals give cold shoulder to local males

...emain static waiting to be chosen). This unique mating practice enables the seals to avoid the loss of ge...been assumed that the females were passive, simply mating with their nearest male. However, using paternity tests, the scientists demonstrated that only a qu...

Male reindeer inflate a large air sac in the neck region to emit their hoarse rutting calls

...l of Anatomy. As in other species with harem-like mating systems, the voice organs of reindeer differ accor...aneously, the performance serves to attract female mating partners. Males vocalize almost exclusively during the autumn rutting season whereas females are ...

Remote sheep population resists genetic drift

... total amount of possible gene combinations that a mating male and female couple can produce. Scientists believe greater genetic diversity corresponds with greater odds of survival and successful reproduction due to a greater variety of genetic tools an organism has to combat the forces, such as diseases, t...

The price of vanity: Mating with showy males may reduce offspring's ability to fight off pathogens

...dith Mank (Uppsala University, Sweden) finds that mating with males who possess showy traits ?such as bright colors or long tails and fins ?results in higher testosterone levels in males over many generations. Because male and female testosterone levels are correlated, female choice also results in an inc...

Gene study shows three distinct groups of chimpanzees

...ally different social systems, cultures, diets and mating systems. On the other hand, in this study, looking at three "subspecies" of common chimpanzees, "we found significant genetic variation," said Przeworski, "but there's very little detectable difference between the populations in terms of appearan...

Mitochondrial genes move to the nucleus -- but it's not for the sex

...production of eggs or pollen, via meiosis. But the mating system determines whether or not this separation is permanent. With self-pollination, the components separated by meiosis are brought back together. In contrast, the components are further separated if they mix and match haphazardly during out-crossi...

Microfluidic chip helps solve cellular mating puzzle

... has solved a long-standing mystery related to the mating habits of yeast cells. The findings, described ...her when they want to merge, engaging in a type of mating behavior. Human cells ‘talk?to one another in a similar way, and it’s important to understand this p...

When smell cells fail they call in stem cell reserves

.... “The ability to smell is crucial for eating, mating and survival, and it’s important that the olfactory system be fully operational all the time,?explains Reed. “The HBCs act as a fail-safe to ensure continued function of the sense of smell.? The discovery of these two distinct types of stem cells ...

Why do some queen bees eat their worker bee's eggs?

...red 50 species and found no evidence that multiple mating by the queen correlated with reduced rearing of workers' sons or greater worker reproductive policing. Were the textbooks wrong" A new study appearing in the current issue of The American Naturalist strongly supports Hamilton's original theory. To...

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