CreatureCast – Picky Females

CreatureCast - Picky Females from Casey Dunn on Vimeo.

A couple of weeks ago the Dunn Llab went out after work, and we got to talking. There's this thing that usually happens whenever we get together after a day in the lab or field — being a group where everyone focuses in one way or another on the diversity and evolution of reproduction and development, we start to tell stories about how animals reproduce. Someone mentions some surprising tidbit of reproductive biology they recently heard, and that sets it off. Then someone else remembers a weirder story, and tells it. This spurs someone else's memory, and so on, and then I start feeling overwhelmed.

Well, this time we got caught up on the issue of female choosiness. It takes more energy and resources to make an egg packed with resources, or to raise offspring, or to carry a baby inside the womb, than it does to make sperm. This often leads females to be more selective about their mates than males are. We started talking about ways in which female choosiness manifests itself; sometimes through behavior, sometime through anatomy, and sometimes at the level of the cell. And then sometimes it is all for naught.

In this episode of CreatureCast Rebecca Helm, a graduate student in the Dunn Lab, recounts a few short stories about the many levels of reproductive selection.

Editing and animation by Sophia Tintori. We Want To Be Old by Bird Names. Photos of bowers by Mila Zinkova and Peter Halasz. Duck story from the research of Richard Prum and Patricia Brennan. Video of the inside of a comb jelly egg by Christian Sardet, Danielle Carré and Christian Rouviere, from the BioMarCell group. This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

--Sophia Tintori

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CreatureCast – Picky Females

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