According to a new study, female animals could be learning from other females how to choose distinctive and unique males as their mates.
What Is Sexual Selection?
This generally pertains to sexual selection, which posits that the evolution of particular physical traits in creatures could offer those who harbor such traits a better success in gaining mates. The elaborate and long tail of peacocks, for one, falls under sexual selection.
These particular traits have ended up evolving in order to boost a creature's chance of attracting mates, as opposed to boosting their odds of survival.
Generally speaking, male animals compete with each other for females, as the only investment males give is less substantial compared to what females have to put in. Because of this, it becomes costlier for a female to mate with a male that is poor-quality compared to a vice-versa situation, because males can quickly jump to another female.
Because of this, some sexually-selected male traits have ended up evolving in the animal world.
Scientists have mostly granted attention to the interactions shared between males. Doing so has shifted their focus from the role of females in shaping evolution. Now, specialists are focusing more on the female role in this aspect.
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Females Learning From Females Regarding Sexual Selection
In the new study, researchers came up with a mathematical model that could explain some sexual selection theory gaps. At present, sexual selection theories cover the notions that mates are chosen based on good genetic signs.
Physical appearance is not the only thing that females consider when choosing their mates. For one, male ring-tailed lemurs with the most pungent smell end up attracting most females. There are also cases of trait complexist, including the dance moves and singing of birds of paradise.
As opposed to the prominent sexual selection theories, animals with hindersome traits that still end up surviving could also harbor high quality in terms of genetic. These fall under sensory bias theories.
However, these theories do not shed light on the trait variation across males or why the preferences of females could vary intraspecies or as time passes.
In the new study, researchers focused on how the mate choices of females could be based on observations of females who have more experience in choosing mates. Animals are known to learn by observing each other. Interestingly, learning has been. Learning has also been observed in mate choosing as females who observe other females with male mates have higher likelihoods of choosing that male or one with similar traits.
The model was based on the inferred attractiveness hypothesis, which holds that females who are inexperienced compare male qualities, that were chosen by a female that is experienced, to all other males. However, this notion does not shed light on the rich divergence among males.
Nevertheless, the study is the first to propose that females could not be "mind readers" and that they may make mistakes when they try to imitate other females.
As the researchers used a computer simulation based on their model on a population that covered many males mating with many females, the model revealed that when females chose mates based on what experienced females opted for, these traits ended up becoming fixed within the population. When a more distinctive male was chosen, the rare trait became more common and resultantly less attractive. This led to female preference switches as time passed by.
Whether this translates to real life remains a mystery until field studies are run by scientists. Nevertheless, this study serves as the first to shed light on how variation could be kept within populations.
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