Sexually Selected Infanticide in a Polygynous Bat

Background: Adult individuals of many species kill unrelated conspecific infants for several adaptive reasons ranging from predation or resource competition to the prevention of misdirected parental care. Moreover, infanticide can increase the reproductive success of the aggressor by killing the offspring of competitors and thereafter mating with the victimized females. This sexually selected infanticide predominantly occurs in polygynous species, with convincing evidence for primates, carnivores, equids, and rodents. Evidence for bats was predicted but lacking. Methodology/Principal Findings: Here we report the first case, to our knowledge, of sexually selected infanticide in a bat, the polygynous white-throated round-eared bat, Lophostoma silvicolum. Behavioral studies in a free-living population revealed that an adult male repeatedly attacked and injured the pups of two females belonging to his harem, ultimately causing the death of one pup. The infanticidal male subsequently mated with the mother of the victimized pup and this copulation occurred earlier than any other in his harem. Conclusions/Significance: Our findings indicate that sexually selected infanticide is more widespread than previously thought, adding bats as a new taxon performing this strategy. Future work on other bats, especially polygynous species in the tropics, has great potential to investigate the selective pressures influencing the evolution of sexually selecte

The Modern Career of the Oldest Profession and the Social Embeddedness of Metaphors

Metaphors are elementary particles of meaningfulness, serving as cognitive resources for framing social problems or social movement narratives. This article presents a diachronic analysis of a metaphor synthesizing insights from cultural sociology and conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), an interdisciplinary neuroscientific program with robust empirical findings for how meanings change over time. I track the diffusion of ‘the most ancient’ metaphor for prostitution through publications on both sides of the Atlantic from its coinage by Rudyard Kipling in 1888. I explain the puzzle of its persistent polysemy by its embeddedness in three discursive communities: occupational professionals; social movements demanding state action against white slavery; and journalists, writers and cultured readers. These competing uses explain the paradox of how a metaphor about prostitution’s timelessness became a convention at the very movement that prostitution’s abolition seemed possible. While this single metaphor was used to express multiple opinions about prostitution’s inevitability, it shored up the ontological status of prostitution, a concept that contemporary researchers still struggle to unpack or displace. The diachronic analysis by which cultural categories are juxtaposed and reified is one of the insights of CMT for social cognition, with implications for sociological analysis of narratives, tropes and discourses

Pursuit of paired dijet resonances in the Run 2 dataset with ATLAS

New particles with large masses that decay into hadronically interacting particles are predicted by many models of physics beyond the Standard Model. A search for a massive resonance that decays into pairs of dijet resonances is performed using..