Rice Genome Approaches Completion 英文参考文献.docVIP

Open access, freely available online Synopses of Research Articles Why Bad Boys Always Get the Girl and Other Tales of Evolutionary Madness DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0030057 Biologists studying the evolution of mate choice have their work cut out for them. Not only is there little agreement on how best to determine the interplay between mate choice and ?tness, there’s not even consensus on how to estimate ?tness. (Fitness being an individual’s success in passing their genes on to future generations.) Why females fall for captivating males that give them nothing but trouble is especially puzzling. Such males tend to contribute their genes and little else, leaving the female to spend precious resources bearing and raising her young, efforts that often cut her life short. Of course, females are not all innocence and light in the mating game: some black widow species, for example, famously make dad a post-coitus snack. Still, females typically incur more costs than males in rearing offspring, especially when they choose ?ashy mates. So why do they do it? One model holds that females put up with deadbeat dads because the bene?ts, though indirect, outweigh the costs: that is, attractive males are more likely to grace their offspring with good genes that increase survival (“I’m so ?t I can afford to waste energy But when the ?tness consequences for their sons and daughters are taken into account, mate costs are balanced by, and may even be outweighed by, the indirect bene?ts of spawning offspring with elevated ?tness.This bene?t stems in large part, the authors argue, from siring sexy sons. How does one distinguish lothario from loser in the cricket world? By running a cricket tournament, of course. For crickets to mate successfully, the been mounted in the ?rst round and remounted in the second were deemed “attractive.”Males rebuffed in the ?rst round that remained unmounted longest in round two were“unattractive.”Females were randomly assigned to males that were ei