Reproduction
The fierce sexual competition between males is due to an unbalanced sex ratio. A female attracts males by moving her tongue around to initiate mating. If the male does not respond, she moves on to another mate. The average gestation period is 190 days. The infant will stay with the mother for 18–24 months. After males reach sexual maturity, they are expelled from their natal group. The male must then invade a foreign group. There, the male kills off the other leader and whatever offspring the first leader sired. By doing this, the male is killing any possible competition. Less than 25% of offspring survive male invasions.
Read more about this topic: Venezuelan Red Howler
Famous quotes containing the word reproduction:
“As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.”
—Stephen Bayley (b. 1951)
“Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it “the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.” The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of “Artist.””
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“Although Samuel had a depraved imagination—perhaps even because of this—love, for him, was less a matter of the senses than of the intellect. It was, above all, admiration and appetite for beauty; he considered reproduction a flaw of love, and pregnancy a form of insanity. He wrote on one occasion: “Angels are hermaphrodite and sterile.””
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)