You're not a jock. You cycle and jog to keep fit, rather than bench pressing your own weight or anyone else's. You don't swash. You don't buckle. And yet, says painstaking research of the animal world, some women will want to mate with you.
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Researchers at the University of California, Davis, found that it's not always the male with the most testosterone, aggression and assertiveness that goes home with the lady. Despite the fact that it's generally assumed that the female wants the best and strongest genes combined with hers - all that Darwinian, natural-selection stuff.
Non-jocks in there with a fighting chance
Well, not always. Take the male coho salmon, which usually grows into something called a hooknose in adulthood. It's called that because its nose has a definite hooked character to it.
But some salmon don’t ever grow into hooknoses. They stay a bit smaller than the hooknoses and are called jacks. Researchers found that the hooknoses dominate the jacks, but don't regard them as competition when it comes to mating. They're more concerned about fighting other hooknoses.
One researcher, who spent a lot of time watching the fish, pointed out that the females spent more time tending the eggs fertilised by the jacks than the hooknoses.
He also suggested that the female fish got it on with the jacks because they mature earlier than the hooknoses, which spend an extra year growing sharp faces before they can mate.
A major factor seems to be the physical abuse the hooknoses subjected the females to. They chase and bite the females to get their attention, while
the jacks simply "pull up beside the females and wiggle."
Moral of the story? Forget the pick-up lines. Treat the female as an equal.
Ask her name and suggest you’d like to get to know her.
Is sex for the birds?
But there's more. This time about the Japanese quail. Researchers from McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, observed that the male quails become very aggressive when competing for females. The aggression often spills over into courtship and mating and the females can get hurt.
To gauge the female's reaction toward the victor and vanquished in these
enounters, the scientists let a female quail watch two males fight. They then separated the antagonists and put them on opposite sides of the female's cage.
Then they watched to see which of the males she'd go to. They repeated this with a variety of males and females, presumably until the area was ankle deep in the feathers from male quails.
They found that the virgin females often preferred the dominant males. But the females with some sexual experience preferred the losers, presumably because they'd learnt through painful experience that the dominant males could be abusive.
Are there some parallels here for humans? Well, there may be a place for gentle males in the gene pool – and the beds of sought-after females – for quietly confident males who prefer Shakespeare In Love to WWF wrestling. (William Smook)
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