{"id":96,"date":"2003-10-21T23:28:13","date_gmt":"2003-10-21T23:28:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=96"},"modified":"2011-05-01T18:34:07","modified_gmt":"2011-05-01T23:34:07","slug":"promiscuitys-for-the-birds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=96","title":{"rendered":"promiscuity\u2019s for the birds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Finally, what adulterous female songbirds have  always wanted: Scientific proof of the evolutionary advantages of  promiscuity. A team of researchers from the Max Planck Research Center  for Ornithology in Germany and the Zoological Museum in Norway spent  four years studying a population of songbirds known as blue tits  breeding in the Viennese Forest in Austria. A female blue tit normally  chooses a single social partner, a male to defend a territory and to  help care for offspring, but she also occasionally mates with other  males outside her breeding territory without her partner&#8217;s knowledge.  The researchers report in the Oct. 16 <em>Nature<\/em> that they have found that  the offspring from these extramarital affairs were more genetically  varied than those sired by her social mate, and were more likely to  survive and reproduce. Females from these extramarital couplings were  found to produce larger clutches of eggs and lived longer. Males from  these couplings also produced more surviving offspring. As an added  bonus, these males also tended to have more elaborate head crests,  assumed to make them more attractive to other females. The study  supports the idea that females mate many times to get the best possible  genes for their young and gives evidence that evolutionarily speaking &#8212;  at least for female blue tits &#8212; promiscuity may be the way to go. <\/span><\/p>\n<h6><em>This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the <\/em>Boston Globe&#8217;s<em> Health\/Science section on 10\/21\/2003.<\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Finally, what adulterous female songbirds have always wanted: Scientific proof of the evolutionary advantages of promiscuity. A team of researchers from the Max Planck Research Center for Ornithology in Germany and the Zoological Museum in Norway spent four years studying &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=96\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boston-globe-3","category-news-briefs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=96"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1126,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions\/1126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=96"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=96"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=96"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}