Male-Male competition

 

In todays lecture we learned about sperm competition and combat in male to male competition. 

A real life example of sperm to sperm competition would be some species of flies. They compete with other males by increasing their sperm load and reproduce if their sperm is fast enough. It is a constant competition, inside and outside of the body. 

A real life example of combat competition would be moose fighting for a female. With their large antlers, they are used as weapons to fight with another male. These males combat with their antlers to prove strength to the other male. They rarely die from these fights, but the article I read said that their antlers will get stuck with each other and the moose die from starvation. It made me so sad to read that. 

These two competitions are similar in the fact that their overall goal is to reproduce and nothing will get in their way internally or externally. They all have the same mindset with different tactics of doing so. One of these is an external weapon and the other is internal.