Titles are important

I have to say that animal behavior can be a pretty interesting field. Check out two of the articles I picked to read for our lab meeting today:

1. Virgin doves and mated hawks: contest behavior in a spider.
When I was browsing the literature for a new paper (that didn't involve social insects), this one immediately popped out -- what a cool title!! First of all, it evokes an image of fighting spiders, which is totally cool. Second, it hints at the game theoretic underpinnings of the pape. Yay game theory! And the paper is fairly interesting - at least, the parts that map behavior onto a game theory framework are interesting. My favorite sentence: "However, the situation in (this species) is made more complex by the fact that females often consume some of their mate's legs during copulation." Hehe.

2. Independence, not conflict, characterizes dart-shooting and sperm exchange in a hermaphroditic snail.
Okay, the only reason this titled popped out at me was because it used the word "conflict." The "dart-shooting" and "hermaphroditic snail" are thrown into the title as sort of afterthoughts. Apparently this species of snail pierces its partner with a spike-like object during mating (each snail acts as both a male and a female during mating), and while the spike somehow promotes sperm survival for the donor snail, the costs to the recipient snail are not known. The study didn't find any costs (and thus any evidence for conflict), so it wasn't as cool as I was expecting, but I have to say that they at least could have made the title a lot more interesting. Well, at least the paper had a cool picture. :)