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News Home | Story Big brains mean 'tiny testes' From: By Nick Buchan December 07, 2005 Bat / file Age-old argument ... scientists say size does count / file WOMEN have suspected it for millennia, and scientists have finally proved it - men cannot have both big brains and big testicles. Brainiacs and scholars everywhere may gnash their teeth, but according to a recent study of bats, nature forces the males of a species to make a painful trade-off between mental capacity and sperm production. Because of the high-energy demands of both brains and sperm, scientists b elieve males cannot generate large amounts of both. Some female bat species are unusu ally promiscuous, so natural selection led to males evolving enormous te sticles in order to compete with more virile suitors - however at the ex pense of their brain capacity. Male bats from less promiscuous species, in which the female is guarded b y a single partner, had relatively large brains. While ape species feature testicles ranging from 02 to 075 per cent of their body mass, certain types of bats boast testicles up to 85 per cen t of their mass.
The scientists, from New York's Syracuse University, believed this phenom enon is explained by their "expensive tissue" hypothesis. "Because relatively large brains are metabolically costly to develop and maintain, changes in brain size may be accompanied by compensatory chang es in other expensive tissues," wrote Dr Scott Pitnick in the journal Pr oceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Letters. The researchers believed this theory would explain the brains/sperm trade -off found in bats. "Relatively small brains were found in species that have females that mat e promiscuously, are polyandrous and assemble in multi-male/multi-female roosts," wrote the scientists. "Male promiscuity, by contrast, had no evolutionary influence on relative brain dimension." Despite these findings however, intelligent males should not despair. Whi le the "whether size matters" debate over may have been settled, the "qu ality over quantity" battle is just heating up.
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