Word: harems
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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After careful observation of many groups of wrasse, D.R. Robertson, a zoologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, found that the death or disappearance of a male has a startling effect on one of the several female fish in his harem: she becomes a male. Within a few hours of her liberation from the influence of a male, the head female in the harem begins to display male mannerisms. She reconnoiters the borders of the absent male's territory and pays aggressive calls on the other females. Within four days her courtship and spawning behavior cannot be distinguished...
Over a period of 25 months, Robertson studied 19 different harems of L. dimidiatus and recorded 48 instances of sex transformation. "Probably all females are capable of changing sex," Robertson writes in Science, "and most (possibly all) have testicular elements within perfectly functional ovaries." What prevents wholesale sex transformation by the females in a harem is a chain of authority extending downward from the lone male. A former female (like most other males of this species), he bullies the strongest female, who in turn is overbearing toward the female under her, and so on down the social scale. As long...
Protogyny (the development of a male from a functional female) is not uncommon among other kinds of tropical fish. But the rigid hierarchy of the wrasse harems represents a much more stringent control over the production of males than is found in the comparatively random sex reversals of "schooling" fish. Robertson believes that the inbreeding produced by this aquatic pecking order is genetically advantageous to the species. Because "the social organization is a framework within which the selective process works," he concludes, the genes passed on by each male wrasse are those best adapted to the environment of the harem...
Jason (Bruce Dern) lives like some sleazy sultan, complete with a harem consisting of an aging, manic coquette (Ellen Burstyn) and her empty-eyed stepdaughter (Julie Anne Robinson). He is a wheeler-dealer in shopworn dreams, an anxious scam artist with a line of patter that makes him sound like one of Eugene O'Neill's drummers. David, ever skeptical, eventually lets himself be suckered in, more to demonstrate a kind of desperate solidarity with his brother than anything else. The scheme is an old Staebler fantasy: take over an island called Tiki in the Hawaiian archipelago, build...
Outside the Stadium on the other hand. Harvard coach Joe Restic gloated over his team's very impressive performance. "I've got no first string quarterback," he said, with the happy shrug of a shiek making his nightly decision outside the harem...