More notes

Just got home from Northampton

Its way too early in the morning

This paper was vry useful for evidence for things.
Anyway these are some notes i've just typed up.

Roberts, S.C. and Gosling, L.M., 2003, Genetic similarity and quality interact iun mate choice decisions by female mice. Nature Genetics,35(1),pp103-106.

AKA the mouse paper.

Lots of detailed empirical data involving mouse mating decisions. The thesis of it all is that female mice make mate choices based on traditional good genes traits (scent marking frequency) and also based on genetic dissimilarity at MHC loci.

It is imprortant that mice use more than one strategy, as a lot of theory seems to try to pigeon hole species into using one strategy, this is total madness, surely females will use any strategy possible given the right conditions, if it can work then it will most likely exist.

The final important point is that the female mice switched their strategy based on the males they had to choose btween. If male diversity in the good genes marker was low, they choose using dissimilarity and vice versa. Importantly however was the fact that females would always look for the good genes marker first. This is like a stepped rule method, could it be extended to a decision tree-like process.