Female fish are attracted to homosexual behaviour!

 That’s the key finding in a new study published in the Journal Conservation Letters and as Woody Allen said:   ‘bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night’  David Bierbach and a team from the University of Frankfurt investigated male homosexual behaviour in the Shortfin Molly Poecilia mexicana.  In this species it is the females who select their mate, based on a number of reasons – social interaction being one of them - with the results suggesting that: “P. mexicana females increase their preference for initially non-preferred males not only after observing those males interacting sexually with females, but also when having observed them initiating homosexual behaviour”.  Or to put it simply: males that flirt with other males get the gal! In essence, the girls are choosing the popular boys, irrespective of who they are popular with. In other twist, appearing ‘bi-curious’ could be a tactic employed by less attractive males: “As homosexual behaviour is regularly seen in small P. mexicana males, we speculate that it might represent an alternative mating tactic used by subordinate, and thus, less attractive males to overcome reproductive constraints owing to the intrinsic female mate preference for large, colorful and dominant males. Homosexual behaviour has been identified across the animal kingdom and has always baffled biologists as it appears, on the surface, to confer no advantage to an individual and would be expected to disappear from a population as the behaviour was lost through the lack of reproductive success of those individuals exhibiting it – as any detrimental characteristic is likely to be lost in a population.  Bierbach et al suggest that the behaviour seen in this study may go at least part of the way to explain the persistence of homosexual behaviour in the natural world. You can read the full study at: http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/9/1/20121038.full