Poly Behavior

It is not out of political correctness that 'polyamory' is not in behavioral endocrinologists' lexicon - its because they find it excessively vague. For example, the vasopressin-deviant naked mole rats are monogamous even though their females are promiscuous. This is because they live in societies, in which the fat ones have the job of plugging tunnels when it rains. This is important to the distinction because males that do not help their mates are called polygynous.¹

Organisms that are born female and later metamorphosize into males are protogynous hermaphrodites. Those that shift sexual morphology in the presence of a sexual partner are simultaneous hermaphrodites.

In a study in which a bluehead fish alpha female was spayed and the dominant male was removed from its tank, cohabitating females wanted to spawn with her as her phenotype changed.<sup>2

1</sup>Sapolsky, Robert. Human Behavioral Biology. Stanford Courseworks. Stanford University, Stanford, CA. Web. 7 Nov. 2011. .
²Becker, Jill, S Breedlove, David Crews, and Margaret McCarthy. Behavioral Endocrinology. second edition. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002. 243. Print.