vendredi 24 octobre 2008

Rock-Paper-Scissors mating strategies

Biologist Barry Sinervo from the University of California, Santa Cruz has discovered an RPS evolutionary strategy in the mating behaviour of the side-blotched lizard species Uta stansburiana. Males have either orange, blue or yellow throats and each type follows a fixed, heritable mating strategy:

  • Orange-throated males are strongest and do not form strong pair bonds; instead, they fight blue-throated males for their females. Yellow-throated males, however, manage to snatch females away from them for mating.

  • Blue-throated males are middle-sized and form strong pair bonds. While they are outcompeted by orange-throated males, they can defend against yellow-throated ones.

  • Yellow-throated males are smallest, and their coloration mimics females. Under this disguise, they can approach orange-throated males but not the stronger-bonding blue-throated specimens and mate while the orange-throats are engaged in fights.

This can be summarized as "orange beats blue, blue beats yellow, and yellow beats orange", which is similar to the rules of rock-paper-scissors.




Vu ici.

2 commentaires:

Patrick a dit...

suite à la lecture de ton article, je tire deux conclusions possibles, mais je choisis la dernière:

1) tu as regardé des articles d'évolution et/ou traitant des "mating strategies" et as atterri sur cette sous-catégorie;

2) tu as regardé l'article de roche-papier-ciseaux et as trouvé cette sous-section intéressante :)

Seigneur a dit...

Je regardais la section juste au-dessus, qui parle de la relation dans les real-time strategy video games (quelque chose du genre)... j'ai vu ça en lisant des articles hier à propos de rush et de micromanagement et de trucs de même (par exemple il y a une relation comme ça dans des jeux genre Age of Empires II je pense, où des trois unités sont faibles contre l'une et forte contre l'autre...).

Et après j'ai vu la section d'en dessous, et je me suis dit, "wow, mais... mais wow".

:)