Question

1. What’s weird about the reproductive strategy of the Striped Texas Lizards?

2. What are 3 disadvantages or costs of sex?

3. What is the Red Queen Hypothesis?

4. Summarize how the guppies demonstrated that variation is the key to “why sex.”

5. How did sex start?

6. What’s “the war between the sexes” refer to?

7. Why did the idea of female choice driving sexual selection take so long to be accepted?

8. You don’t have to write this down, but be sure you understand the peacock experiment.

9. What percentage of songbird chicks in a typical nest are fathered by different parents? Why do the female birds risk this? And why do they bother with “monogamy” in the first place?

10. What’s different about the Jacanas?

11. Bonobo troops behave in a rather dramatically different fashion than troops of chimps. What’s the explanation for that?

Answer 1

1. Striped Texas lizard is all female species because, it reproduces by parthenogenesis. Though it reproduces by parthenogenesis, it shows mating behavior with other females. It is observed that the mating behavior stimulates egg production.

2. Disadvantages of sex---

1. Finding a mate takes energy and time. Some times a mate may not be available resulting in no reproduction.

2. It leads to production of offspring even though one may not desire to have.

3. If the age of the partners involved is less, it can be dangerous if the female gets pregnant.

3. Red queen hypothesis states that the organisms have to keep evolving continuously to adapt to the surroundings and reproduce so that they can  survive against ever evolving opposing organisms.

4.Guppies have lot of variation in their color. Color variations are due to the sexual reproduction. Guppies color variations are to attract mates for sexual reproduction. Male guppies have exaggerated bright colors where as female guppy exhibits preference to male colors. Guppies also show inter individual color vision variation. So, variation in color vision causes difference in preference of coloration of male. There are many variations in the genes that control the color in guppies. These variations resulted in different colorations in guppies.