From: Chris Hibbert (cth@pancrit.org)
Date: Fri May 02 2003 - 21:36:18 MDT
>> (Greg Jordan <jordan@chuma.cas.usf.edu>) apparently wrote:
>> Sterilization disrupts herd social patterns?
>> More than violent deaths? please.
and Lee Daniel Crocker responded
> Actually, that seems quite reasonable. Many mammals have
> alpha males with harems, while most males don't breed at all.
> When an alpha male dies, another male takes his place. But
> animals wouldn't /know/ they were sterilized, and so if you
> happened to sterilize an alpha male, you wouldn't reduce the
> breeding rate, you'd eliminate it entirely.
This only holds if the alpha males succeed in preventing the other
males from copulating. I don't know of any cases where that's true.
The most recent exposure I've had to harem-keeping mammals was a visit
to see the elephant seals at Aņo Nuevo 3 years ago.
http://discuss.foresight.org/~hibbert/AnoNuevogifs/VisitToAnoNuevo.html
The alphas recruit betas to help police the harem. When the alpha is
busy defending his claim to being the biggest and meanest, one of the
betas will occasionally wander off behind a dune to take advantage of
the distraction. I'm sure I've heard the same about harem-keeping
apes. It's hard to imagine any other evolutionary outcome.
Chris
-- It is easy to turn an aquarium into fish soup, but not so easy to turn fish soup back into an aquarium. -- Lech Walesa on reverting to a market economy. Chris Hibbert chris@pancrit.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat May 03 2003 - 09:17:58 MDT