The bee microbiota as a barrier against disease.

There are many fish in the sea, but having a large school to choose from doesn’t make mate choice decisions any easier. In fact, selecting a mate requires members of the choosing sex to process, integrate and recall a great deal of information related to mate quality across many potential mates. As this choice is directly related to fitness, it stands to reason that the cognitive ability of the choosing sex is under considerable selective pressure. Therefore, Alberto Corral-López, a PhD student in Niclas Kolm’s laboratory at Stockholm University, Sweden, along with several colleagues, decided to test the hypothesis that smarter individuals choose better mates. They knew from previous work in the Kolm lab that female guppies with big brains have a higher cognitive ability than female guppies with small brains, so they staged a dating game to test whether or not the big-brained guppies made better mate choice decisions.