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A comment on How female elk adjust behaviour with age to avoid hunters. Parent comment

Re:How female elk adjust behaviour with age to avoid hunters by 13of40 on Thursday June 15, 2017 @07:48PM (#14565455)
I'm not sure about elk, but deer tend to have an alpha male that mates with multiple females, so shooting a buck doesn't damage the population as much. I think that's why antelope hunting is gender-agnostic and you need to win a lottery to do it: They're monogamous, so killing a male has the same impact on the population as killing a female.
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Re:How female elk adjust behaviour with age to avoid hunters by thaumasiotes on Thursday June 15, 2017 @09:43PM (#14566026)
It seems a lot more likely that killing males would discourage them from being monogamous than that killing males would have the same population impact as killing females.
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Re:How female elk adjust behaviour with age to avoid hunters by Mz on Thursday June 15, 2017 @09:46PM (#14566041)
If you assume that they adapt the way human cultures do to such influences, which isn't necessarily true of animal populations.
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Re:How female elk adjust behaviour with age to avoid hunters by thaumasiotes on Friday June 16, 2017 @12:54AM (#14566757)
The only things you need to assume are that they're alive and their mode of reproduction is obligately sexual. As far as the prediction is concerned, humans are totally irrelevant.
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Re:How female elk adjust behaviour with age to avoid hunters by wbl on Thursday June 15, 2017 @11:50PM (#14566551)
Evolutionary pressure is a harsh mistress.
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Re:How female elk adjust behaviour with age to avoid hunters by IndrekR on Friday June 16, 2017 @03:32AM (#14567238)
I am not sure how well Heinlein's polyandrous Loonies[1] would match real-life scenarios. This did not happen in New South Wales where male convicts outnumbered the female convicts six to one[2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convict_women_in_Australia

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Re:How female elk adjust behaviour with age to avoid hunters by thaumasiotes on Friday June 16, 2017 @10:33AM (#14569349)
Males and females are not symmetrical. A female who never reproduces because she wants to be faithful to a mate who doesn't exist is giving up 100% of her reproduction. A female who stays faithful to a mate who does exist is giving up 0%, in terms of quantity -- one mate can provide all the children a female is capable of having.
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