A wide range of environmental and physiological factors influence the type and extent of sexual dimorphism found in animals. Influential factors include variable climate, competition for resources and mates, mate choice, and parental investment. In addition, some investigators attribute differences in body size to physiological factors influenced by genetic and...
Pheromones are chemical cues produced by organisms that affect the behavior and/or physiology of conspecifics. The orchestration of reproductive behaviors in many animals depends on the expression of sex pheromones. In insects, intraspecific variation in sex pheromone expression is commonly observed and often influences social interactions between individuals. To what...
The benefits of reproduction are clear, but there are also costs. Much is known about the costs of reproduction in females, but only recently have male costs been investigated in any depth. These costs of reproduction may be minimized by appropriately modifying behavior, but there has been little research on...
Postcopulatory sexual selection—sperm competition and cryptic female choice—has become a major area of research over the past 40 years. Within this field there are many outstanding questions at every level of analysis, from proximate to ultimate. The fitness consequences for both sexes in the period after copulation and before fertilization...