Mouse moms can control the sexiness of their future sons

Can you smell his sex appeal from here?

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In the wild, mice are social and promiscuous, with males competing to attract females. Under typical lab breeding programs, mice are paired and mate without the competition, taking away the adaptive advantage of being able to attract a lot of ladies.

University of Utah scientists have been studying what happens genetically as a population of wild-derived mice adapts to captive, non-competitive conditions over generations. They've discovered that the female mice have some control over the sexiness of their future sons.

Their results support a longstanding evolutionary concept called the "sexy son hypothesis" which suggests that when male attractiveness comes at a cost of reduced fitness elsewhere—think peacocks and their ridiculous tails, which make them slow but really get the peahens' feathers ruffled—it still pays off for the females to mate with them because their own sons will inherit the attractive trait and get more of their own ladies, keeping more of their genes in the game.