Why are females more powerful and larger than males in certain species while in others they are smaller and weaker?
In: Biology
In the animal kingdom a common reason why males are larger than females is because they compete with each other, so bigger males have more offspring.
In species where the males are not physically competing with each other to win females, the females are usually larger.
In regard to producing offspring, it is actually much more important for the female to be large, because a larger female can produce more. Females have to produce eggs and either lay them, or gestate the offspring within their body, while males only need to provide the much smaller sperm. A tiny male can still produce millions of sperm for fertilization.
Because of the importance of large females, I don’t know of any species where the females are significantly smaller than the males, whereas there are some species where the females can be orders of magnitude larger than the males.
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