Manliest Fish Have a Blessing and a Curse
From Times Staff and Wire Reports
Larger male genitalia in some fish are more attractive to females, but they make the males more susceptible to predation, Yale researchers reported Friday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Studying western and Bahamas mosquitofish -- species in which the males cannot retract their gonopodia -- the team found that females preferred to watch videos of males with digitally enhanced genitalia.
But laboratory experiments showed that males with larger organs were slower to escape predators through evasive swimming bursts, thus requiring a delicate balancing of size for survival.
