For cats, the female cat emits a mating call and multiple male toms typically hear the call and show up. Then the toms have some kind of physical battle for dominance—with a lot of screeching you can hear—with the strongest, most aggressive tom obviously more likely to win. The pair of cats do their business and the tom runs off, at which point the female starts round 2 of the mate competition...
This to me seems to be a stress test for robustness. The tom has to perceive the female, navigate through non-home territory to her location, and survive a battle. And to succeed he has to be able to do it on many nights, not just one, if he dies from wounds from the first battle his genes likely die with him.
This means the cat genes are constantly being stressed above natural environment stresses, for half the genes each iteration. And yeah, for this to work the species has to afford failures, only a small percentage of the toms need to successfully reproduce each iteration. Hermaphrodites don’t have this ‘disposable test animal’ for evolution to check functionality each round.
For cats, the female cat emits a mating call and multiple male toms typically hear the call and show up. Then the toms have some kind of physical battle for dominance—with a lot of screeching you can hear—with the strongest, most aggressive tom obviously more likely to win. The pair of cats do their business and the tom runs off, at which point the female starts round 2 of the mate competition...
This to me seems to be a stress test for robustness. The tom has to perceive the female, navigate through non-home territory to her location, and survive a battle. And to succeed he has to be able to do it on many nights, not just one, if he dies from wounds from the first battle his genes likely die with him.
This means the cat genes are constantly being stressed above natural environment stresses, for half the genes each iteration. And yeah, for this to work the species has to afford failures, only a small percentage of the toms need to successfully reproduce each iteration. Hermaphrodites don’t have this ‘disposable test animal’ for evolution to check functionality each round.