Males: They’re all alike
And they want just one thing—the hairy brutes! Rachel Ehrenberg describes in Science News a typical male tactic, the hairy brute in this case being the topi antelope:
Male topi antelopes will resort to deception to keep a potential mate around, snorting as if there’s a lion nearby just when it seems she might wander off. The discovery is the first report of outright mate deception in an animal other than Homo sapiens, a research team reports in the July American Naturalist.
Some mother birds will feign a broken wing to lure a predator away from their nest, and there are reports in animals such as monkeys and squirrels of males deceiving other males in the heat of competition. But the male antelope behavior “is the clearest example of tactical deception between mates in animals other than humans,” comments Cornell University’s H. Kern Reeve, an expert in the evolution of cooperation and conflict in animal societies. “This is quite interesting.”
Study leader Jakob Bro-Jørgensen discovered the devious behavior while studying topi antelopes on the savannas of the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, where during the spring mating season males stake out territories rich in grass. The female antelopes are sexually receptive for one day only, and they spend that day visiting several males, munching grass and mating.
Bro-Jørgensen noticed that when a female would start to wander away from a male’s territory, the male would look in the direction she was headed, prick his ears and snort loudly — the same snort the animals use when they’ve noticed a lion, leopard or other approaching predator.
“It was quite funny — it made me laugh,” says Bro-Jørgensen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Liverpool in England. “It’s such an obvious lie — clearly there’s no lion.”
Suitors in nature commonly exaggerate their virtues. But this work documents a rare situation in which evolution favors outright lying in the mating game, says Reeve. The cost of the lie is minimal to the male antelope — he merely snorts. But the cost to the female of ignoring the lie could be great — if there truly is a predator nearby, she’s dead.
To test whether the males were lying outright, Bro-Jørgensen and his colleague Wiline Pangle of Ohio State University in Columbus first …
