What Makes a Finch Unfaithful?
by Sarah C. P. Williams 胡德良 譯
| Some birds chirp to show happiness, but when a male zebra finch，sings to a female finch he's never met before, he's looking to have an affair. If she sings back, she's probably willing to have one, too. But affairs make more sense for males than for females; when males mate outside of their typical monogamous coupling, they spread their genes far and wide, but adulterous females don't spread their genes any further than they would otherwise and additional fathers do not help raise offspring. So why do females do it? A new analysis of courtships from thousands of encounters between finches, as well as genetic analyses of paternity, reveals that the female offspring of more promiscuous males are more likely to mate with multiple males themselves. The reason, researchers report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may be that some males harbor a "promiscuity gene" that they pass down to their offspring, both male and female. | 一些鳥的鳴叫是高興的表示。但是，當(dāng)雄性珍珠鳥對(duì)著它以前從未見過(guò)的雌鳥歌唱的時(shí)候，它是在尋求外遇。如果雌鳥也用歌唱回應(yīng)，很可能說(shuō)明它也想私通。然而，私通在更大程度上是雄鳥的意思，而不是雌鳥的意思；當(dāng)雄鳥在典型的一夫一妻制之外進(jìn)行交配時(shí)，它們的基因傳播得廣泛而遙遠(yuǎn)；私通雌鳥的基因比如果不斯通的話傳播得并不遠(yuǎn)，這些添加的父親并不幫助撫養(yǎng)后代。那么，雌鳥為何要私通呢？對(duì)成千上萬(wàn)偶遇的珍珠鳥進(jìn)行了求愛分析，同時(shí)還分析了它們父輩的基因，分析顯示：比較放蕩的雄鳥，它們的雌性后代本身更有可能跟多個(gè)雄鳥交配。今天，研究人員在《美國(guó)國(guó)家科學(xué)院院刊》在線版上報(bào)道說(shuō)：原因可能在于一些雄鳥擁有一種“亂交基因”，這種基因可以傳給后代，既傳雄性也傳雌性。 |
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