2025/06/01 by David M. Shuker, Ellie B W Smith · 1 voice
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #Animal Behavior and Reproduction #Genetic and phenotypic traits in livestock #Plant and animal studies
paper · doi:10.1093/jeb/voaf060
openalex publication_date 2025/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
“It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Nature tells us, in the most emphatic manner, that she abhors perpetual self-fertilisation.” Charles Darwin (1877). The various contrivances by which orchids are fertilised by insects (2nd ed.). Mating systems describe the how, when, where, and how often organisms come together to mate (Davies, 1991; Emlen & Oring, 1977). Following Clo and colleagues (Clo et al., 2025), we consider “mating” as the bringing together of gametes of the opposite sexes or mating types to fuse to form zygotes, spanning broadcast spawning, spermatophore deposition, and copulation in animals to animal-, wind-, water-, or self-pollination in plants. In animals, copulations can also take place outside of the context of reproduction, including in terms of nonsexual social interactions, but here we are interested in matings as reproductive events. Clo et al. (2025) provide a panoramic view of the study of mating systems in animals and plants. They seek to highlight key questions and concepts for animal and plant biologists studying mating systems and to look for conceptual overlap between the two. However, plant mating system research appears to be dominated by inbreeding, while concepts explored by animal mating systems researchers, such as the operational sex ratio (or OSR, the ratio of males to females in the mating pool: Emlen & Oring 1977), are barely considered in their review. Here, we discuss three issues arising from their paper. First, we consider what mating systems are and why we study them. Second, we emphasize the distinction between the causes and consequences of mating systems. Third, we argue that animal and plant mating systems are far more similar in essentials than might appear from Clo et al., even if animals and plants might occupy different parts of mating system parameter space.