Imagine if you only had one shot at passing on your genes before you died. It happens more often in the natural world than you might expect: suicidal reproduction – where one or both sexes of a species die after a single ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 7, 2013
2
0
Analysis of ancient DNA from one of the best-preserved Neolithic tombs in Britain has revealed that most of the people buried there were from five continuous generations of a single extended family.
Archaeology
Dec 22, 2021
2
896
Elk have antlers. Rams have horns. In the animal kingdom, males develop specialized weapons for competition when winning a fight is critical. Humans do too, according to new research from the University of Utah. Males' upper ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 5, 2020
12
3023
A combined team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences reports that a certain fungus uses chemicals to trick male flies into mating with infected dead females. ...
Scientists in Brazil are preparing to release millions of factory-bred mosquitoes in an attempt to wipe out their distant cousins that carry tropical diseases. The insects' method: have sex and then die.
Plants & Animals
Oct 29, 2016
31
1628
A trio of scientists, one with Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, another from Museo Historia Natural Noel Kempff Mercado and a third independent researcher, report evidence of several Bolivian river dolphins playing ...
While some STEM majors have a one-to-one male-to-female ratio, physics, engineering and computer science (PECS) majors consistently have some of the largest gender imbalances among U.S. college majors—with about four men ...
Education
Jun 18, 2020
41
1479
Charming might not be the best way to describe a spider, but researchers at the University of Cincinnati are finding a wide spectrum of personality in a creature whose behavior was thought to be inflexible and hardwired in ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 22, 2017
9
6083
A new study delves into the evolution and function of the human growth hormone receptor gene, and asks what forces in humanity's past may have driven changes to this vital piece of DNA.
Molecular & Computational biology
Sep 24, 2021
0
268
A pair of researchers at Kyoto University has found that chimpanzees will spontaneously dance to music. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Yuko Hattori and Masaki Tomonaga describe ...
Male (♂) refers to the sex of an organism, or part of an organism, which produces small mobile gametes, called spermatozoa. Each spermatozoon can fuse with a larger female gamete or ovum, in the process of fertilization. A male cannot reproduce sexually without access to at least one ovum from a female, but some organisms can reproduce both sexually and asexually.
Not all species share a common sex-determination system. In humans and most animals, sex is determined genetically but in other species it can be determined due to social, environmental, or other factors. The existence of two sexes seems to have been selected independently across different evolutionary lineages (see Convergent Evolution). Accordingly, sex is defined operationally across species by the type of gametes produced (ie: spermatozoa vs. ova) and differences between males and females in one lineage are not always predictive of differences in another.
Male/Female dimorphism between organisms or reproductive organs of different sexes is not limited to animals; male gametes are produced by chytrids, diatoms and land plants, among others. In land plants, female and male designate not only the female and male gamete-producing organisms and structures but also the structures of the sporophytes that give rise to male and female plants.
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