Monday, July 07, 2014

How Women's Brain Works When Picking Mates Revealed


That's the title of a piece popularizing the message of three studies.

The three studies are about fruit flies.  But even that Science Daily summary suggests that we can draw important conclusions from girl fruit flies which might apply to human chicks:

What are the complex processes in the brain involved with choosing a mate, and are these processes different in females versus males? It's difficult to study such questions in people, but researchers are finding clues in fruit flies that might be relevant to humans and other animals.
Or perhaps not.  I've never before realized that fruit flies can so well stand for humans in various studies.  Imagine all the money we can save by just doing fruit fly studies in medicine!  Eggs can stand for babies and so on, and the sexual behavior of fruit flies can make studies of human sexuality unnecessary:

Males perform a sequence of five behavioral patterns to court females. First, males orient themselves while playing a courtship song by horizontally extending and vibrating their wings. Soon after, the male positions itself at the rear of the female's abdomen in a low posture to tap and lick the female genitalia. Finally, the male curls its abdomen, and attempts copulation. Females can reject males by moving away, kicking and extruding their ovipositor. Copulation lasts around 15–20 minutes,[13] during which males transfer a few hundred very long (1.76 mm) sperm cells in seminal fluid to the female.[14] Females store the sperm in a tubular receptacle and in two mushroom-shaped spermathecae, sperm from multiple matings compete for fertilization.

I bolded the part which relates to the topic of this post.