CARNAL NATION

According to researchers from Binghamton University and the University of Arizona, females will choose gentlemen over aggressive males when given the option to do so. Omar Tonsi Eldakar and his team studied sexual conflict in water striders, whose model system is common in insects. They classified the male subjects as either "gentlemen/nice guys" or "psychopaths/jerks" and observed that the females clustered around the nice guys.

Unlike previous research which had not allowed for movement between groups, this new study utilized equipment that allowed some females to jump from group to group according to their own free will. Eldakar’s previous research indicated that groups in which males take a gentlemanly approach to sex outperform groups that involve aggression, but within the same group, the jerks dominate in one-on-one competition.

"When all the males were gentlemen, the females laid about three times more eggs than they did when all the males were psychopaths. And yet within each group the psychopaths were doing better than the gentlemen,” explains co-author David Sloan Wilson. But when they had the option to move around, females would leave when approached by the “jerks.”

"The whole thing resulted in a heterogeneity in which the females were clustered with the gentlemen. It's the movement of individuals that creates these differences between groups that favor nonaggressive males," says Wilson.

The full study is published in the November 6th edition of the journal, Science.