Female fur seals give males the cold shoulder
The Star, 11 Feb 2007
A LEADING theory about mating displays among animals – and arguably humans, too – is that the males do all the hard work, flashily showing off their fitness.
The females are passive, letting the males strut their stuff, finally making a choice on the finest display of male strength or dominance.
But Antarctic fur seals have given this gender stereotype a gigantic wack of their flipper, scientists report.
In this species, the males lie around passively while females go on a jaunt to choose a mate, seeking out a male which is least likely to be genetically related to them.
The clever seals do this to resolve something called a “lek paradox,†the researchers believe.
A lek is the place where species gather for the mating display.
The lek paradox is this: If passive females only choose the flashiest males, only offspring with similar genetic traits would emerge.
The species would eventually suffer from inbreeding, and this is something that spells doom. Poor genetic diversity means vulnerability to disease and parasites.
The scientists, from the University of Cambridge  and  the  British Antarctic
Survey (BAS), studied a colony of the seals on one of the islands on Britain’s South Atlantic possession, South Georgia.
They found females would travel up to 35m across the breeding grounds to select a mate that had the best chance of being genetically diverse from themselves.
The study is published on Thursday by Nature, the weekly British science journal. – AFP