Most of us are familiar with yawn contagion, which is the act of spontaneous yawning when someone nearby yawns, often but not always audibly. For humans, yawning can emanate from fatigue or boredom, and either seeing or hearing ...
A team of researchers studying the Ngogo community of wild chimpanzees in western Uganda's Kibale National Park for two decades has published a report in Science showing that females in this population can experience menopause ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 26, 2023
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162
Among many species, breeding preferences and tactics can differ among males and females. When aggressive behavior by males toward unreceptive females goes awry, it may result in failure to reproduce, and in some cases, fatality ...
Males of a species evolving traits for sexual conflict can cause problems for females, and, ultimately, the whole population.
Evolution
Mar 3, 2023
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324
A team of researchers at the University of Western Australia, working with a colleague from the University of Exeter, has found that as female southern pied babblers grow older, they produce more offspring—even as they ...
White-necked jacobin hummingbirds sport a colorful blue-and-white plumage as juveniles. When they grow into adulthood, males retain this dazzling pattern, while females develop a more "muted" palette of green and white—at ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 7, 2022
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194
A team of psychology researchers from the University of Amsterdam, Western Washington University, the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto, has found that reading books to children that have female ...
Female white-faced capuchin monkeys living in the tropical dry forests of northwestern Costa Rica may have figured out the secret to a longer life—having fellow females as friends.
Plants & Animals
Aug 10, 2022
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296
A multidisciplinary team led by researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh has found that wild red deer become less sociable with age.
Plants & Animals
Jul 21, 2022
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48
Some male wolf spiders seem to get luckier than others when it comes to courting females. The secret of their courtship? It's complicated, says a new study led by the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Plants & Animals
May 27, 2022
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124
Female (♀) is the sex of an organism, or a part of an organism, which produces mobile ova (egg cells). The ova are defined as the larger gametes in a heterogamous reproduction system, while the smaller, usually motile gamete, the spermatozoon, is produced by the male. A female individual cannot reproduce sexually without access to the gametes of a male (an exception is parthenogenesis). Some organisms can reproduce both sexually and asexually.
There is no single genetic mechanism behind sex differences in different species and the existence of two sexes seems to have evolved multiple times independently in different evolutionary lineages. Other than the defining difference in the type of gamete produced, differences between males and females in one lineage cannot always be predicted by differences in another. The concept is not limited to animals; egg cells are produced by chytrids, diatoms, water moulds and land plants, among others. In land plants, female and male designate not only the egg- and sperm-producing organisms and structures, but also the structures of the sporophytes that give rise to male and female plants.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
