English

Average sex ratio and population maintenance cost

Populations and Evolution 2017-02-15 v3

Abstract

The ratio of males to females in a population is a meaningful characteristic of sexual species. The reason for this biological property to be available to the observers of nature seems to be a question never asked. Introducing the notion of historically adapted populations as global minimizers of maintenance cost functions, we propose a theoretical explanation for the reported stability of this feature. This mathematical formulation suggests that sex ratio could be considered as an indirect result shaped by the antagonism between the size of the population and the finiteness of resources.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1004.2270,
  title  = {Average sex ratio and population maintenance cost},
  author = {Eduardo Garibaldi and Marcelo Sobottka},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1004.2270},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

18 pages. A revised new version, where all the text was improved to become more clear for the reader