Synonyms
Definition
When some females in a population have more surviving offspring than other females in the population
Introduction
Variance in reproductive success occurs when some individuals in a community have more surviving offspring than others and is typically discussed as a result of sexual selection (Trivers 1972). Sexual selection is a competition within one sex for sexual access to members of the opposite sex and a differential choice by members of one sex to breed with particular members of the opposite sex. The traditional view among evolutionary biologists is that males compete against each other for access to females, and females are coy and choosy in determining who they will mate with. In his experiments with Drosophila melanogaster, Bateman (1948) provided evidence for these conjectures and also showed that male reproductive success varied much more than female reproductive success. That is, many more males than females produced zero surviving...
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References
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Starkweather, K. (2016). Variance in Female Reproductive Success. In: Weekes-Shackelford, V., Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_120-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_120-1
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