"Mate choice" refers to the process by which an individual of a species selects a suitable partner for reproduction. It involves evaluating potential mates based on certain characteristics such as physical attractiveness, behavior, or other desirable traits. Essentially, it is the decision of whom to form a romantic or sexual relationship with in order to have offspring.
Full definition
Turkish and Moroccan respondents indicated virtually identical levels of preference for parental influence
on mate choice.
This process facilitates the possibility
of mate choice within an egg cell.
Female choice for good quality males is familiar to everyone, whereas much less is known about the evolution of
male mate choice.
Cognitive processes underlying
human mate choice: The relationship between self - perception and mate preference in Western society.
To tease apart how neurons make a decision, the authors took a genetic approach: they searched for genes that
control mate choice.
However, despite how
important mate choice is, the genes, cells, and circuits that are required to make such a decision remain largely unknown.
First, except for opposition against out - group mating, other factors that might affect preferred levels of parental influence
on mate choice were not explored.
Female mate choice and male - male competition are the typical mechanisms of sexual selection.
As a whole, these findings indicate that there is a rather poor match between our sample's verbally stated preferences for mate traits and the preferences they expressed through their
actual mate choices.
Fisher, H., Aron, A & Brown, L (2005) Romantic Love: An fMRI Study of a Neural Mechanism
for Mate Choice.
Darwin described sexual selection
by mate choice specifically: Each species evolves its own standard of beauty by which it chooses mates.
«Although
mate choice studies in humans have routinely recorded pill use during the last decade to control for its confounding effects, little effort has been invested in understanding the consequences of such effects of the pill,» said study author Alexandra Alvergne from the University of Sheffield.
Determined to investigate the importance of skin color in judgements of facial attractiveness, as well
as mate choices, in three separate, yet linked, Internet - based studies, the team set out to examine the importance of high levels of these pigments (carotenoids and melanin) in attraction choices.
In many songbird species, male song serves as an important cue in female mate choice [1,2] and may be used to defend territories from invasion by conspecific males [3].
Variation in song not only aids in species recognition, but is particularly useful for female
mate choice because it allows females to discriminate between males from local versus non-local populations.
[Christopher D. Rodeheffer, Randi P. Proffitt Leyva and Sarah E. Hill, Attractive Female Romantic Partners Provide a Proxy for Unobservable Male Qualities: The When and Why Behind Human Female
Mate Choice Copying]
What Darwin was really saying is that female sexual autonomy is an evolutionary force of nature, and one of the consequences of sexual autonomy
through mate choice is beauty.
By prolonging the period during which males would need to mate guard females to ascertain paternity, the temporal variability of this signal may curb mate - guarding efforts by male bonobos and thereby enable females to
express mate choice without being constrained by males.
If the temporal inflation and variability of sexual swellings in relation to ovulation constrains mate - guarding efforts by male bonobos, this could enable females to express
mate choice without being constrained by males.
Incipient species of African cichlid fish have divergent genomic islands associated
with mate choice.
«This is the first study to
examine mate choice among wild - spawning fish of both hatchery and wild origin, and the results suggest that greater diversity of immune genes between wild - born pairs of coho salmon may increase offspring survival,» said Amelia Whitcomb, who did the research as a master's student at OSU and is lead author on the publication.
This study examined the opposition against out - group mating and the attitude towards parental influence on
mate choice among 107 Dutch, 69 Moroccan, and 69 Turkish participants aged between 15 and 25.
The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's forgotten theory of
mate choice shapes the animal world — and us
Breeders should do pedigree research to determine how much AI disease risk their breeding dogs have and where risks high make
mating choices which will reduce risk in the puppies.
Changing her ways: Number of options and mate standard strength
impact mate choice strategy and satisfaction.
Failure to do annual eye exams through at least 10 years of age, or assuming that any retinal defect found can't be inherited because the dog or its parents have cleared the prcd test has the potential to result in increased frequency of those other and presently rare forms of retinal disease because breeders are makng
mating choices based on false assumptions.
Guppies lie
about mate choice to trick rivals by Anne - Marie Hodge: When it comes to sex among guppies, competition is high for those at the top of the game.
Lead author Conny Bartsch from Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, said: «It has long been thought that a single feature — the size of a bird's song repertoire — may be important for females
during mate choice.
«Males have
little mate choice,» Hasselquist told Nature Science Update, «if they get a female, they're very happy.»)
«Choosing a mate: It's the brain, not the nose, that knows: Changes in the brain
determine mate choice in the European corn borer, an important pest of maize.»
However, this may be different in species that exhibit sexual cannibalism, like the group - living C. citricola spider, where males are often eaten after mating and so may be «choosier» due to a
single mate choice.
Instead, new research using fruit flies as a representative species indicates that females do not have specific preferences, suggesting that 150 years of evolutionary theory
around mating choice may need to be tossed out.
The key to understanding the question of choice may be in the longer time it takes female fruit flies reach a state of arousal — a lag that is often misinterpreted as females
exercising mate choice.
But on paper, no blend of personal qualities and partner preferences thought to influence
mate choices pegged which opposite - sex duos would hit it off, Joel's group concludes.
The scientists concluded that TAAR genes could play an important role in olfactory
mediated mate choice in mammals.
«MHC genes — a group of genes encoding immune defence proteins — play an important role in
bat mate choice, as they do for humans, mice and many other vertebrates, too, «states Simone Sommer, project leader, previously at the Leibniz - IZW and now at the University of Ulm.
Alice Baniel, Elise Huchard, Susanne Schliehe - Diecks, and Peter M. Kappeler, «MHC -
disassortative mate choice and inbreeding avoidance in a solitary primate», Molecular Ecology, vol.
Phrases with «mate choice»