Behavioral Ecology Blog

Although its practice has been questioned, partly because of its abuse in the EvoPsych world- the analysis of human behavior in an evolutionary framework is super interesting and is one of my favorite things to think about. Within the realm of human behavior, particularly interesting are the selective pressures surrounding human mate choice and [...]

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Are they too fat for your tastes… too skinny??
Take to poll over on the right sidebar. For those you you that have ever thought about this, the result is pretty intuitive, but lets collect the data and see what it looks like.
The Question:
Think of your current sexual partner (or most recent if you have [...]

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Partly motivated by the previous post about Muscle men- I am left wondering about mate choice in women who control sufficient resources such that during mate choice- the abundance of resources on a potential mate becomes a non-issue..
Basically- do rich (or otherwise well off) women’s optimal mate choices resemble that of a one night [...]

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Well scientists can now predict your most secret behavior by assessing your scores on various tests of personality.. Turns out- those warm and fuzzy types- and the anti-social are much more likely to be sexually promiscuous…. This story, predictably covered by LiveScience (Who Sleeps Around? Scientists Know) is based on a paper in the Journal [...]

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There is an exquisitely interesting paper in this edition of The American Naturalist (Sex in the Morning or in the Evening? Females Adjust Daily Mating Patterns to the Intensity of Sexual Harassment ), providing yet another layer of complexity on the issue of sexual conflict. Basically, the authors Løvlie and TommasoPizzari studied [...]

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Here is the intro to an old essay by Geoffrey Miller, on why we buy the crap we do.

At the top of Sennheiser’s range is the “Orpheus Set”, stereo headphones that retail for 9,652 pounds. They are good headphones no doubt, well-reviewed and finely crafted. But to most ears, they deliver a sound [...]

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…include siring more offspring- so long as you are a firefly..
MALE COURTSHIP ATTRACTIVENESS AND PATERNITY SUCCESS IN FIREFLIES
So this is a way cool study in fire flies.. Briefly, the researchers do an experiment to determine if mating success correlates with reproductive success (actual parentage) They allow females to choose and mate with their preferred [...]

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Pinnipeds have traditionally been thought of as a model system for exploring models of mating system evolution. The typical system involves sexual dimorphism with males being much larger. These males control a territory, and the females that reside on this territory. This usually results in polygyny- the mating system defined as the [...]

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