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Although the social mole-rats are commonly classified as eusocial breeders on the grounds that groups include a single breeding female (the “queen”) and a number of nonbreeding individuals (“helpers”) of both sexes, alloparental care is not highly developed in these species and there is no direct evidence that the presence or number of nonbreeders is associated with reductions in the workload of the “queen.” An alternative interpretation of mole-rat groups is that the social mole-rats are cooperative foragers rather than cooperative or eusocial breeders. Here, in captive colonies of Damaraland mole-rats (Fukomys damarensis), we provide the first evidence that increases in the number of nonbreeding subordinates in mole-rat groups are associated with reductions in the workload of “queens” and with increases in their fecundity.
Parents will increase their fitness by varying the sex ratio of their progeny in response to differences in the costs and benefits of producing sons and daughters. Sex differences in energy requirements or viability during early growth, differences in the relative fitness of male and female offspring, and competition or cooperation between siblings or between siblings and parents might all be expected to affect the sex ratio. Although few trends have yet been shown to be consistent, growing numbers of studies have demonstrated significant variation in birth sex ratios in non-human mammals. These are commonly cited as evidence of adaptive manipulation of the sex ratio. However, several different mechanisms may affect the birth sex ratio, and not all of them are likely to be adaptive. Valid evidence that sex ratio trends are adaptive must be based either on the overall distribution of those trends or on cases in which the sex ratio can be shown to vary with the relative fitness of producing sons and daughters. The distribution of observed sex ratio trends does not conform closely to the predictions of any single adaptive theory. Some recent studies, however, indicate that, within species, the sex ratio varies with the costs or benefits of producing male or female offspring.
Reports of socially transmitted traditions based on behavioural differences between geographically separated groups of conspecifics are contentious because they cannot exclude genetic or environmental causes. Here, we report persistent differences between neighbouring groups of meerkats ( Suricata suricatta ) where extensive gene flow precludes genetic differentiation. Over 11 years, some groups consistently emerged later from their sleeping burrows in the morning than others, despite complete turnovers in group membership and the influx of immigrants. Group territories overlapped and, in many cases, the same sleeping burrows were used by different groups. Differences persisted even after accounting for effects of group size, weather and burrow characteristics, and were unrelated to food availability within territories. These results provide compelling evidence that the emergence times of meerkat groups represent conservative traditions.
MLR, ., Poland in an attempt to learn their family’s history without going to Auschwitz itself. Good work, Ewa! U M S T e Drama of Celebrity. By S M. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. . pp.; b/w illustrations. $.; £. ISBN –––– (ebk –––-). In one of the most widely researched and acutely conceptualized books that I have had the pleasure to read in recent years, Columbia’s Sharon Marcus rewrites the history of the modern phenomenon of celebrity as it has developed over the past two hundred years. Ranging across times and places in remarkable fashion, and appropriately illustrated by over one hundred black-and-white images, e Drama of Celebrity refuses to reduce its explanation of the fame game to a single privileged source. Instead, it keeps in play—in an intellectually exhilarating fashion—the triangular geometry of celebrities, media, and publics (also in the plural), who are all shown to contribute to the perpetual reshaping of the particular instances of this phenomenon in the ‘suspenseful, interactive, serial drama’ (p. ) of the book’s title. As such, Marcus nuances a commonly held view that celebrity is created by media, which she traces back to Daniel Boorstin’s study, e Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (London: Vintage), noting on her opening page that ‘many people still cast stars as deceptive effects of a sinister, monolithic, and all-powerful cause: the media’ (p. ). As she continues: ‘e notion that celebrities are famous merely for being famous persists to this day, appealing to laudable desires to resist authority and unmask falsehood’ (p. ). Although she is too polite to say it, this is also a notion that informs a sizeable chunk of our teaching about culture’s relationship to power. Marcus does not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Hence she brings back into play the agency and subjecthood of stars (referencing Taylor Swi’s Tumblr post ‘We don’t ask you for free iPhones’, which forced Apple to pay royalties to artists) and fans (not least through richly original archival work on their scrapbooks), while retaining an informed sense of the ideological and technological power of the media. In this version, the media are powerful, but not all-powerful, and ‘we can opt out’; as Marcus points out, ‘No one ever did time for ignoring One Direction or not liking Miley Cyrus’ (p. ). Intriguingly, she deconstructs the largely negative scholarly take on celebrity as media manipulation by historicizing the origins of that scholarly discourse in ‘the first serious analyses of celebrity in the s and s’, whose reference points were ‘the authoritarian Hollywood studio system and the [. . .] personality cults formed around Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini’ (p. ). Although e Drama of Celebrity bears witness to historical change, its author is unusually, and refreshingly, keen to stress continuities, perhaps because she herself is already something of an academic star, as one of our best literary and cultural historians, and does not feel the need to make a splash by overdramatizing the Reviews diachronic process. And it is her sense of the past that gives genuine weight to her reading of the present. For in each of the eight chapters (from ‘Defiance’, via ‘Sensation’, ‘Savagery’, ‘Intimacy’, ‘Multiplication’, and ‘Imitation’, through to ‘Judgment’ and ‘Merit’), the book’s central figure, Sarah Bernhardt, returns as ‘the godmother of modern celebrity culture’ (p. ). Indeed, the authority and acumen with which Marcus traces the roots of modern celebrity back to the nineteenth century are not surprising when one recalls her previous scholarship on English and French culture of that period in her two monographs: first, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), and then Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). e audience for her latest book deserves to be yet wider still. U C N W Character as Form. By A K with illustrations by D S. London and New York: Bloomsbury. . vi+ pp. £.. ISBN ––– –. Character as Form is no conventional academic book. Punctuated with small illustrations by artist David Scher, and divided into sections with quirky subheadings such as ‘Another way to use this...
In their thoughtful, clearly argued and comprehensive review of definitions of sexual selection, Shuker and Kvarnemo make a strong case for defining sexual selection as operating through access to gametes (Shuker and Kvarnemo 2021). This differs from some previous definitions of sexual selection which additionally include selection operating between females or males arising from intrasexual competition for breeding opportunities or the suppression of rivals (Darwin 1871; Clutton-Brock 2007; Watson and Simmons 2010) or from intrasexual competition for access to breeding partners that contribute to the care of offspring in situations where access to the gametes of the opposite sex is unlikely to limit the breeding success of individuals (Andersson 1994, Reynolds and Szekely 1997). For example, Andersson’s widely used definition of sexual selection includes intrasexual competition between females to monopolize access to males in polyandrous birds where the benefit of having access to multiple partners probably lies in their additional contributions to parental care rather than in access to additional gametes (Reynolds and Szekely 1997; Emlen and Wrege 2004). In contrast, Shuker and Kvarnemo would presumably regard this as a form of natural selection.
Life threatening hypoglycaemia has been closely associated with the use of quinine, but the effect of quinidine and the synthetic antimalarials on the homoeostasis of glucose has not been investigated. In volunteers given a fixed dose of 500 mg base and patients with malaria given a quinidine loading dose (15 mg base/kg) mean (SEM) plasma insulin concentrations rose from 6.1 (1.5) mU/l to 10.9 (4.4) mU/l (p less than 0.02) and 10.4 (2.0) mU/l to 18.5 (5.3) mU/l (p less than 0.04), respectively. Plasma glucose concentrations fell from 4.5 (1.1) mmol/l (81 (20) mg/100 ml) to 4.0 (0.3) mmol/l (72 (5) mg/100 ml) in volunteers (p less than 0.04) and from 5.7 (1.3) mmol/l (102 (23) mg/100 ml) to 4.8 (1.6) mmol/l (86 (29) mg/100 ml) in patients (p less than 0.05). One of two patients with cerebral malaria and acute renal failure became profoundly hypoglycaemic (plasma glucose concentration 1.4 mmol/l (25 mg/100 ml), plasma insulin concentration 3.1 mU/l). Hypoglycaemia may occur in any severely ill fasting patient given parenteral quinidine. The other antimalarials tested, chloroquine, amodiaquine, mefloquine, and halofantrine, did not stimulate the release of insulin, an important advantage that should be taken into account when treatment is chosen for Plasmodium falciparum malaria.
