Kalahari meerkats live in socially cooperative groups in which one dominant female breeds. The dominant female has been radio collared to allow the sort of close monitoring that made my study possible
If you wait outside a maternity ward, you’ll see parents emerging with roughly equal numbers of boy and girl babies. Why? In mammals, whether a mother produces a boy or a girl is determined by which sex chromosome is carried by the sperm that fertilises her egg. Whether sperm are carrying an X or a Y chromosome, they have equal opportunity to fertilise the egg. So, the outcome is random and each sex should occur at equal frequencies, like flipping a coin. This happens in humans, but is this the case for all animals?
Sex ratio
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