Cricket's finicky mating behavior boosts biodiversity
...the world's fastest-evolving invertebrate. Finicky mating behavior appears to be the driving force behind th...eject songs sung at a different tempo. The Laupala mating ritual lasts up to eight hours and consists of eight to 15 transfers of spermatophores between male ...Field-cricket study shows that when it comes to competition, sperm quality matters
...dicting a male's ultimate fertilization success in mating contexts that involve sperm competition. However, although sperm competition is particularly common among insects, there is a paucity of insect studies examining the selective pressures acting on sperm quality. In the new work, researchers Francisco ...Sexual cooperation: Mating increases longevity in ant queens
... ant Cardiocondyla obscurior actually benefit from mating by gaining increased lifespan and reproductive suc...sterilized prior to mating. It remains unknown how mating increases the longevity of the females. Sexual cooperation, rather than sexual conflict, is promote...Bird brains show how trial and error may contribute to learning
...and Doupe labs are following up to see if the male mating song can be permanently altered by LMAN stimulation and whether females prefer the stable or variable song version....Animal parenting, personality and pair-ups
... the biological mechanisms underlying the animals' mating behavior. Prairie voles mate for life, while a closely related species, the meadow mole, is promiscuous. The difference seems to be that the receptors for a hormone called vasopressin are concentrated in different brain areas for each species, accor...In the mating game, male wild turkeys benefit even when they don't get the girl
...better way to pass on your genes than chancing the mating game alone, according to a new study by a Universi...ct mates because they would eventually inherit the mating territory, which is jealously guarded. And in a Eurasian sandpiper called the ruff, helpers bring in...Researchers find three major beetle groups coming up one testis short
...le counterparts. "The beetles with one testis are mating normally and doing their beetle thing," said James Liebherr, professor of entomology at Cornell University. "It strikes me that carabid beetles are pretty well known to scientists, yet the loss of an entire organ across three major lineages was not f...Light therapy may combat fungal infections, new evidence suggests
...rldwide HIV/AIDS epidemic. Light normally inhibits mating of C. neoformans. The Duke team has now identified two genes responsible for that light response. Loss of the same genes also reduces fungal virulence in mice, they reported. Earlier studies had linked the genes to light-sensing in another distantly ...New findings in taste and smell research
...blished role in immune recognition, also influence mating preference and other social behaviors in fish, rodents, and humans. These studies led to the notion that MHC molecules are a source of unique individual odors that somehow influence the recognition of individual conspecifics. Less clear, however, are...Same-sex mating discovered in a toxic fungus
...asic tenet of sexual reproduction that successful mating requires individuals of the opposite sex, accordin...s, the researchers said. Discovery of the same-sex mating might also help elucidate basic principles governing the evolution of sex, they said. "Sex is genera...Certain fish have a special mating preference
...ven got female selection on film. He examined the mating preference of about 50 mosquitofish females, where...er species of livebearing fish also exhibit female mating preference for males with large genitalia. If true, he said, the evolution of this mating preferenc...DOE JGI announces 2006 Community Sequencing Program portfolio
...r specificity and the other being the evolution of mating systems." M. guttatus is also quite tolerant of soil conditions that would be toxic to other plants. For instance, the species thrives on soils composed of California's state rock-- serpentine--which contains high levels of magnesium, nickel, and man...Size matters: fish genitalia attractiveness vs. predatory escape value
...m during courtship. "Our results suggest that both mating selection, favoring larger genitalia, and natural selection, favoring reduced size, may direct evolution and diversification of genitals," said Layman. The researchers studied female preference and male swimming performance in these two species of mo...Location, location, location: Effect of nuclear organization on transcriptional status
...nd colleagues treated S. cerevisiae cells with the mating pheromone, alpha factor, and then used genome-wide location analysis to observe that alpha-factor-responsive genes became associated with nuclear pore components. This finding represents a relatively surprising positive role for gene recruitment to ...PNAS highlights for the week of May 16 - 20
...sults suggest that alternative mechanisms, such as mating selection favoring larger genitalia and natural selection favoring reduced size, may also drive genital diversification. --- Rapid Identification of Respiratory Pathogens Researchers describe a high-throughput method to identify and genotype the ba...Love's all in the brain: fMRI study shows strong, lateralized reward, not sex, drive
... three distinct but interrelated brain systems for mating and reproduction the sex drive, romantic love, an... specific individuals, thereby conserving precious mating time and energy. Perhaps," she hypothesized, "even love-at-first-sight is a basic mammalian response...Single gene is genetic switch for fly sexual behavior
...he male courtship ritual and males' preference for mating with females, as previous studies have shown. Now, Barry J. Dickson and Ebru Demir of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences show just how intimately fruitless is linked to these stereotypically male behaviors. T...Study in Royal Society journal on heritability of female orgasm
...ia Novel male trait prolongs survival in suicidal mating MCB Andrade, L. Gu and JA Stoltz To maximize rep...maximize the reproductive payoff of their suicidal mating strategy by prolonging their own consumption over two copulations. Contact: Dr Dr MCB...Geneticists identify 'master switch' that causes female flies to behave like males
...le courtship behavior. She vibrated her wings in a mating song and occasionally extended her proboscis. Both...n courts other males, he soon learns to refine his mating strategy. Such habituation was known to involve odors. The scientists now report that when they turn......ster have been given some clues after studying the mating behaviour of the dusky roach (Nauphoeta cinerea). ...that female dusky roaches that were prevented from mating did indeed lose fertility in later life. They were also far less choosy about who they mated with on...