>>10843644>Not only that but males are expendable and die a lot.I can't seem to find any data on the expendability of roosters. But if true, then that my explain why only 1 in 12 roosters mates.
Maybe economic utility may explain why adult chickens produce just as many roosters and hens.
The utility is loosely calculated like this:
Consider the expression
Where is the probability of that something occurring. A chicken's goal is to maximize P(reproduce).
Now if the rooster mates, it will produce many offspring in it's lifetime, so let say, on average, a matting rooster produces N offspring in its lifetime. And on average a hen that mates produce M offspring in its lifetime.
And let say N > M. I think this is true, because each mating rooster mates with a lot of hens, and thus produces more offspring than each hens.
So the probability of the rooster reproduction is about .
And the probability of the hen reproducing is about .
Ideally, a chicken wants to be about 1. So plugging everything into the first equation we get.
.
