March 7, 2001

1 min read

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Wimps Win in Cockroach Romance

By Kate Wong

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Sometimes it pays to be a wimp¿at least if you're a male cockroach. According to a study of the Tanzanian roach Nauphoeta cinerea published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, females prefer low-ranking males to dominant ones any day. Trysts with weaklings, it seems, leave the females roaches in better shape than do encounters with more aggressive males. Yet when females do land a wimp (the high-ranking males do their best to thwart these couplings), they produce fewer sons. This, Allen Moore of the University of Manchester and his colleagues suggest, is the cost of the females' opting for safer sex.

Roaches aren't the only creatures in which females choose subordinate males. Previous studies have documented this preference in about a dozen species, including certain birds and salamanders. Exactly why the female roaches have fewer sons as a result of this choice, however, is a mystery. Paradoxically, producing fewer sons might actually maximize reproductive fitness: with fewer males in the next generation, the sons of these females with eyes for wimps might be more successful in themselves finding mates.

Kate Wong is an award-winning science writer and senior editor for features at Scientific American, where she has focused on evolution, ecology, anthropology, archaeology, paleontology and animal behavior. She is fascinated by human origins, which she has covered for nearly 30 years. Recently she has become obsessed with birds. Her reporting has taken her to caves in France and Croatia that Neandertals once called home to the shores of Kenya’s Lake Turkana in search of the oldest stone tools in the world, as well as to Madagascar on an expedition to unearth ancient mammals and dinosaurs, the icy waters of Antarctica, where humpback whales feast on krill, and a “Big Day” race around the state of Connecticut to find as many bird species as possible in 24 hours. Wong is co-author, with Donald Johanson, of Lucy’s Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins. She holds a bachelor of science degree in biological anthropology and zoology from the University of Michigan. Follow her on Bluesky @katewong.bsky.social

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