Promiscuous Moms Have Sexy Sons -- in Mice, At Least
Who knew? But moms who have a lot of sex partners have sexier male children. We're talking mice, of course. At least that's what a new study has found, according to newswise.com. "University of Utah biologists found that when mother mice compete socially for mates in a promiscuous environment, their sons play hard (read: make lots of babies) and die young," according to the Web site. The male mice attract more females by making more urinary pheromones, but smelling sexier shortens their lives. (Not sure this would work for humans.) “If your sons are particularly sexy, and mate more than they would otherwise, it’s helping get your genes more efficiently into the next generation,” newswise.com quotes biology professor Wayne Potts, senior author of the new study. Yet there's no faking that male mice who create more baby mice run out of life more quickly. In the study, only 48 percent of these hard-working mice lived to the end of the experiment, compared ...