Meeting Abstract
Across the animal kingdom, females of some species are “sex-role reversed,” suggesting they face stronger competition for mates than males do. Sex-role reversal is often associated with additional life history traits, such as male-only parental care and female-biased dimorphism in ornamentation, weaponry, and body size. While much attention has been paid to behavioral and morphological sex differences, less is known about the physiological mechanisms underlying sex-role reversal. We review the hormonal, neural, and genomic evidence that females are physiologically ‘reversed’ from systems with ‘conventional’ sex roles. We evaluate largely untested hypotheses on the interplay between sex-roles, physiology, and the resolution of trade-offs between mating and parental effort.
