Abstract
Those who work on sex ratios of parasitoid wasps have long been lulled by the idea that, because of a haplo–diploid sex determination mechanism, these insects have a high degree of control over the sex of their progeny. Meanwhile, those working on birds and mammals have been subjected to the rather burdensome notion that heterogametic sex determination mechanisms severely constrain the production of biased sex ratios, and thus that these taxa are probably unable to achieve sex-ratio control. The latter view has been challenged recently by remarkable sex ratios in several higher vertebrate species, such as the Seychelles warbler Acrocephalus sechellensis; but does the constraint still hold in general? A new meta-analysis by West and Sheldon [ 1 West, S.A. and Sheldon, B.C. (2002) Constraints in the evolution of sex-ratio adjustment. Science 10.1126/science.1069043 Google Scholar ] of sex ratios in parasitoid wasps, birds and mammals concludes that it probably does not, and also that the sex ratios of wasps and birds are similarly influenced by environmental uncertainty.
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