3 ms·
Since female bees are hard to come by, then it is better for the male bee to be too eager to mate, and sometimes mate with flowers, rather than too discriminati
by rectangletangle 9y ago
Since female bees are hard to come by, then it is better for the male bee to be too eager to mate, and sometimes mate with flowers, rather than too discriminating, and sometimes pass up real female bees
I guess they favor recall, over precision.
- oh_sigh 9y agoIsn't this just 'sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive'?
- rectangletangle 9y agoThat's probably the ultimate cause of the behavior. However, most insects are heavily r selected (low parental investment, lots of offspring). So the cost of eggs/parental investment relative to sperm isn't nearly as polarized as in a K selected species, e.g., humans, whales, elephants. Though it would seem even with a slight difference in the metabolic cost of eggs vs sperm, and eons of time, the bee's "search algorithm" would be optimized/directionally selected toward favoring recall. A similar dynamic also works behind Gause's law, where two competing species can't sustain a constant population while occupying the same ecological niche, over a multi-generational timescale.
- nine_k 9y agoFlowers themselves just bathe everything in their version of sperm, aka pollen. Bees are so much more precise.