Why are female insects more aggressive and bite more than the male ones, but most male mammals are more aggressive and tend to fight more?
In: Biology
I don’t think your premise is totally accurate, there’s just such a huge spectrum of animals involved and you’re over simplifying it. Aside from mosquitoes, can you suggest an overly aggressive female insect with an innocuous male counterpart? I can tell you that female hyenas are terrifying and I wouldn’t want to cross a mama Grizzly either.
I think the trend you might seeing is this-
Insects don’t raise their young (again a generalization) it’s typically a give birth to thousands of babies and hope for the best situation. Where as mammals tend to raise a small number of offspring for a long(ish) period of time.
In this case, the evolutionary trend would be for insects to reproduce as much as possible, so males are just sperm machines and females and just egg machines. Producing sperm is pretty cheap and easy, producing thousands of eggs is nutritionally intense. So female insects will require a lot of nutrient rich food and female mosquitos, for example, feed on blood because it contains tons of sugar and protein for eggs. Male mosquitos do not feed on blood, they just fly around impregnating as many females as possible.
Mammals on the other hand raise their young, which is often done by the females. That essentially takes the females out of hunting/food gathering role, as they are focusing on raising offspring. So the males are simply “out there” where people will see them while the females might be in burrow or somewhere out of sight.
But this is really broad and should not be taken as a universal insight, each animal is unique.
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