Average sex ratio and population maintenance cost

The ratio of males to females in a population is a meaningful characteristic of sexual species. The reason for this biological property to be available to the observers of nature seems to be a question never asked. Introducing the notion of historically adapted populations as global minimizers of maintenance cost functions, we propose a theoretical explanation for the reported stability of this feature. This mathematical formulation suggests that sex ratio could be considered as an indirect result shaped by the antagonism between the size of the population and the finiteness of resources.Comment: 18 pages. A revised new version, where all the text was improved to become more clear for the reade

A nonsmooth two-sex population model

This paper considers a two-dimensional logistic model to study populations with two genders. The growth behavior of a population is guided by two coupled ordinary differential equations given by a non-differentiable vector field whose parameters are the secondary sex ratio (the ratio of males to females at time of birth), inter-, intra- and outer-gender competitions, fertility and mortality rates and a mating function. For the case where there is no inter-gender competition and the mortality rates are negligible with respect to the density-dependent mortality, using geometrical techniques, we analyze the singularities and the basin of attraction of the system, determining the relationships between the parameters for which the system presents an equilibrium point. In particular, we describe conditions on the secondary sex ratio and discuss the role of the average number of female sexual partners of each male for the conservation of a two-sex species.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures. Section 2, in which the model is presented, was rewritten to better explain the elements of the proposed model. The description of parameter "r" was correcte