"I sometimes think, just look at this, look at what we're doing," said Bryan Mastrangelo, a boatswain's (pronounced BOE-son) mate third class, as he and a crew roared onto the water one recent morning after a race to the dock.
For these whales, Hawkes said, "some kind of grandmothering does seem likely, but what?" She pointed to a recent study in orcas, which found that killer whale mothers share salmon with "their bigger adult sons". Those adult sons mate elsewhere, and so "the help the older moms give to their big sons results in more grandchildren" who don't compete with the lineage of grandma's orca pod.
At the same time we investigated whether or not male (fathers' and their sons') mating success, when in competition with other males, is positively correlated to female damage.
I mean, elsewhere in the Square, Carol Jackson has been sleeping with Connor, a boy 20 years younger than she is – all because he was her recently deceased son's mate and "the closest I was ever going to be to Billie".
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Pity her daughters-in-law.... or will she accept a Princeton man as her son's mate?
For example, in the jewel wasp case, the presence of other female competitors, flexibility in brood size, the capacity of sons to mate multiple times, the impossibility of migration of sons between pupae and so on, are features of the environment that determine whether any potential egg laying strategy of the jewel wasp is maximally adaptive, and a well confirmed optimality model can show how.
Half the party snuggles up in the mezzanine (which doubles nicely as a den when my son's mates visit); at the far end, the galley kitchen has a fridge, electric hob, microwave and loads of high-end appliances; there's a separate bathroom with shower and loo; there's also a TV, decent wifi and even plenty of storage space.
However, where there is a superparasitic wasp, the superparasitic wasp's sons can mate with the large numbers of daughters of the first wasp.
If a normal female produces only sons, her mate must be homozygous for at least one AM (or XM).
Briefly, natural selection favors mothers who bias the sex ratio toward their daughters, thereby minimizing competition among her sons for mates and increasing the number of mates available for those sons (Taylor 1981).
