AMY XINYANG HONG & CEDRIC TAN
Females are often caught in the fray of male sexual competition. In work published last week (January 22) in Nature, researchers showed that female fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) were more reproductively successful if they lived in groups with related males.
Researchers from the University of Oxford grouped unrelated female flies with three brothers or with three male flies that were not related to one another. The females that lived with brothers had longer reproductive lifespans and more lifetime reproductive success because their reproductive aging was delayed. The groups of brothers competed less amongst themselves than the groups of unrelated males. When an unrelated male was introduced into a group of two brothers, the outsider inexplicably fathered an average of two times more offspring than the ...
