Mating strategies are usually based on getting the fittest possible partner. But female hyenas have an added twist--they favor males who aren't particularly aggressive, a strategy that ensures continued female dominance.
Among spotted hyenas, females run the show. Not only are they bigger, but penislike genitals ensure that copulation occurs only if they want it to, says Marion East of the Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Seewiesen.
But in the war of the sexes, says East, "females can't rest on their laurels." She and her colleagues have now done genetic studies that cast light on how females keep the upper hand. They analyzed DNA from 88 males, 86 females, and 236 offspring in 171 litters, born in Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. Females mate with multiple males, even after pregnancy, and more than one-third of the 75 litters with twin pups had dual paternity. Dominant males did not monopolize females of any rank, East's team reports online 14 May in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.
In other species, males increase their chances of mating by harassing females, shadowing them, or fighting off competitors. That cuts no ice with the female spotted hyena. Pushy or bullying males fathered no more offspring than the others and in fact, says East, "males who try to impose their wishes don't have the success of the males that spend a long time trying to get to know the females."
Marc Bekoff, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, says the work is "really very important" and unusual in that it has detailed long-term data on the behavior of individuals in the wild. By showing that females favor "affiliative" males, he says, the study "shows clearly that females are actually having an effect on the range of personalities of males in the population."
Related site
The Hyena University
Organisation (lots of hyena pictures)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
