Part 1: Once feared extinct, Angolan sable wins new hope for survival
When I first saw this, I thought that all giant sables were thought extinct; which seemed strange, because I'd seen them in zoos rather recently. Turns out this is just about the Angolan giant sable subspecies (which the title of the article said), but I thought that that Angolan sable was substantially different than the other giant sables. I'm not knocking diversity and this is good news, but still, we'd still have giant sables (for awhile) if we lost the Angolans.
Anyway, the large news here is that they found a captured a male sable.
"After six years of monitoring stealth cameras and tracking dung samples, the team has finally captured 10 pure-bred giant sables for a breeding programme and tagged dozens of others to monitor their progress. ... The search then turned to the more remote Luando Reserve, where the only lead was a positive DNA test on a dung sample collected on an earlier trip. There they found two herds, in total around 40 giant sable, and chose one for the breeding area. Even after several weeks back in the capital Luanda, Pedro is still ecstatic about his encounters with the giant sables.
"Getting close to that first male was just incredible," he said. "But for me the most emotional part was when we put the male into the area with the females and stood back to watch them interact. "We only took one because if we put two in there they would kill each other, but this one we chose is at his prime so we hope will be good for breeding." ... A leading authority on the giant sable, Richard Estes of Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology: "I did not think we would find a single male, so to find as many as we did was amazing. This is an absolutely seminal step for the project."
Seminal (from the Merriam-Webster dictionary) -- he certainly chose his words wisely.
Which brings me to part 2.
What really makes a woman want to sleep [aka have sex with] a man?
Trust me, there's science here.
There are seven different sections in the article: Size Matters [height, if you're worried]; The Scent of Sex; Fit for Sex; The Face of Attraction; A Sexy Voice; Something In the Way He Moves; and Sexy Personality -- but the one I find most interesting (and I've read about this particular aspect of sexual attraction before) is the Scent of Sex aspect:
According to new scientific research, a woman will literally sniff out a man's genetic make-up before she decides if he's right for her.
A woman's sense of smell reaches a peak around the time of her ovulation, the 24-hour window -during the monthly menstrual cycle in which she can become pregnant.
The genes responsible for fighting off disease-causing bacteria and viruses are found in a group of genes called the major histocompatibility complex, or MHC.
Different people have various versions of these genes - and it turns out that women can benefit in two ways from mating with men whose MHC genes are dissimilar to their own.
Such a mate is likely to have more dissimilar genes in general, so finding someone dissimilar attractive might help to prevent many of the birth defects associated with reproducing with close genetic relatives.
A second benefit is any children of such a union will have a more robust immune system.The interesting thing is that women seem to be able to sniff out men with dissimilar MHC.
In a revealing study, Brazilian researchers asked 29 men to wear cotton skin patches for five days to absorb their sweat - and thus their body odours.
A sample of 29 women then smelled each cotton patch and evaluated the odour on a scale from attractive to unattractive.
Scientists identified the specific MHC complex of each man and woman through blood tests. Women found the aromas of men who had a complex dissimilar to their own to be the most desirable.
The odours of men who had a complex similar to their own made them recoil in disgust.
This highly developed sense of smell can have a profound effect on women's sexuality.
Evolutionary psychologist Christine Garver-Apgar studied MHC similarity in 48 couples.
They found that as the degree of similarity between each woman and man increased, the woman's sexual responsiveness to her partner decreased.
Women whose partners had similar genes reported wanting to have sex less often. They had less motivation to please their partner sexually compared to the women going out with men with dissimilar genes.
Women with MHC-similar partners also reported more frequent sexual fantasies about other men, particularly at the most fertile phase of their ovulation cycle.
And their sexual fantasies about other men did not just remain in their heads. They also reported higher rates of sexual infidelity.
[This last part is really interesting, because studies of birds have shown that even in stable nesting pairs, the female frequently goes out and gets some on the side so as to increase the bio-diversity of her offspring.]
And thus, thematically, we have human females chasing different men to maximize the genetic fitness of their offspring, and we have seven female sables chasing a male to have offspring.
Other studies show women prefer tall men as husbands and put an even greater emphasis on height in shorter-term sex partners. Women even place importance on height when selecting sperm donors.
And there does seem to be an underlying logic in women's preference for tall men. In Western cultures, tall men tend to have higher socio-economic status than short men.
Each added inch of height has been shown to add several thousand pounds to a man's annual salary.
It is estimated that, on average, 6ft men earn more than £100,000 across a 30-year career than 5ft 5in men.
Tall silverbacks that smell right and who are in pretty good shape, with square jaws and a sense of humour, get the babes?
This explains George Clooney.
No comments:
Post a Comment