Courtship rituals within the animal kingdom can get rather elaborate. Even fruit flies use sex-specific pheromones and have a courtship maneuver that includes the male buzzing its wings alluringly. But the genetic control behind performing these mating rituals seems, at least in the flies, to largely be separate from the system that controls how they're targeted—mutations in a single gene can flip fly behavior so that male animals start pursuing other males. Now, researchers have identified a key regulator of mate choice in an organism much closer to us—the mouse.
Like flies, mice use pheromones to help identify viable mates, and male mice use a series of ultrasonic chirps as part of their courtship ritual, which ends in them attempting to mount the object of their attention. Male mice that don't have a working pheromone system, however, are more likely to direct their attention to other males, suggesting that, as in flies, the targeting of these behaviors operated separately from performing them.
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