Malin Ah-King talked about mate choice in London
Why do animals mate with the “wrong” partner? The Centre’s researcher Malin Ah-King presented a paper on the matter at the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour’s winter meeting in London in the beginning of December.
- What is often seen as the “wrong” partner may in fact be the optimal mate choice in a specific social or ecological situation, says Malin Ah-King from the Centre for Gender Research who presented a paper on “Flexible mate choice in light of new theory and a non-normative view of sexual diversity” together with her colleague Professor Patricia Adair Gowaty from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UCLA.
The ASAB winter meeting, titled "Why do animals mate with the “wrong” partner?", was held at the Zoological Society of London on December 1-2. The conference consisted of 22 speakers, including 5 plenaries, whereof Marlene Zuk held an introductory presentation on “Mate choice and tinkering with evolution”.
Malin Ah-King and Patricia Adair Gowaty talked about their joint study, which is a review of different studies showing flexibility in mate choice.
- The studies show for example that reduced survival chances among animals lead to the acceptance of more partners, in other words they become less selective in their mate choice, says Malin Ah-King.
Ah-King and Gowaty have also found several functions of sexual behavior that are not linked to reproduction, which open up for a non-normative view of sexual diversity among animals.
- Our study indicates that all animals ought to be more or less flexible, depending on social and ecological circumstances. Therefore, when it comes to mate choice, the optimal would be not to have a fixed strategy, Malin Ah-King concludes.
Seemingly wrong mate choice behavior
The two-day meeting, organized by David Shuker and Nathan Bailey from the University of St Andrews, wanted to explore the evolutionary causes and consequences of seemingly "sub-optimal" mate choice behavior, addressing two questions in particular. First, are behaviors such as reproductive interference between species or same-sex matings within species biologically relevant or merely quirky pathologies that offer little insight? Second, to what extent do mate choices in one context (getting the "right" species or sex, or the "sexiest" partner) inform us about mate choice in other contexts?
The hope of the London biology meeting was to stimulate both empiricists and theoreticians to think again about what they expect from mate choice, how discriminating animals should be, what they think mate “quality” actually is, and to consider whether unusual mate choices may help or hinder biologists’ view of mating systems and sexual selection.
Read more about Malin Ah-King (Länk borttagen)