Female Red Squirrels Are, Basically, Tramps

Friday, June 20, 2008 - 14:14 in Biology & Nature

Researchers have found that female red squirrels showed high levels of multimale mating and would even mate with males that had similar genetic relatedness, basically mating with their relatives. Researchers from the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and the University of Sheffield in Sheffield, England, United Kingdom studied a population of red squirrels over a period of three years near Kluane National Park in southwest Yukon. While males mating with multiple females is quite common in the animal kingdom, females that multi-mate is much harder to explain. read more

Read the whole article on Scientific Blogging

More from Scientific Blogging

Related

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox!