Mistaken Identity Hypothesis
The mistaken identity hypothesis suggests that sexual cannibalism occurs when females fail to identify males that try to court. This hypothesis suggests that a cannibalistic female attacks and consumes the male without the knowledge of mate quality. In pre-copulatory sexual cannibalism, mistaken identity can be seen when a female does not allow the male to perform the courtship dance and engages in attack. There is no conclusive evidence for this hypothesis because scientists struggle to distinguish between mistaken identity and the other hypotheses (aggressive spillover, adaptive foraging, and mate choice).
Read more about this topic: Sexual Cannibalism, Evolution and Maintenance
Famous quotes containing the words mistaken, identity and/or hypothesis:
“We are much mistaken if we think that men are always brave from a principle of valor, or women chaste from a principle of modesty.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
—Jeffrey Hart (b. 1930)
“The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of the permanence of nature. We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)