When I get to my office in the morning, I go through my email and read my journal alerts of the newest academic papers published. I often come across papers that are interesting, but today I came across a paper that really blew me away. Why? Because it used a clever research design to yield big theoretical implications — my favorite kind of paper.
The paper, “A Weapons-Testes Trade-Off In Males Is Amplified in Female Traits,” by Christine Miller, Paul Joseph, Rebecca Kilner, and Zachary Emberts published in Proceedings B caught my attention. My lab recently published a paper on trade-offs in male ejaculate quality using a life history framework, so I was interested to see how the findings of this new paper contributed to this broader research area. The research did not disappoint. The results certainly found trade-offs between weapons and testes as the title implies, but with a significant twist, humbly reflected by the last part of the title “amplified in female traits.”
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This article was originally published on my Medium account on 1 August 2019.
Nicole Barbaro, Ph.D. 