(08-15-2013, 06:22 AM)Myxie Tryxle Wrote: The way I've argued this in other threads on the subject is that monogamy may exist under the Keepers, but it wouldn't be the norm.  There's way too much incentive for males to be promiscuous.  If they paired up 1 to 1 and half the population had no mate, there would be a coup or rampant adultery or both.  I've also read that males are reclusive and tend to be nomadic, so polyamory just makes the most sense to me.  For my own backstory, I'm having Myxie's dad experience wanderlust, traveling around and never spending more than a couple months in any single place but tending to return to the same communities around the same time year after year.

As for only the top females breeding, this is also unlikely.  Even if it did exist in this fashion at some point, exposure to the other races (Hyur, etc.) would likely break down that barrier.  Wolves, for example, have alpha structures where only the top male and top female breed.  Dogs, the domesticated siblings of wolves, don't experience that same restriction, indicating it was removed during the domestication process.  Also given that there are more Keepers than Seekers, it's unlikely the Keepers have a more restrictive breeding system than the Seekers.

As for bees, I wouldn't use them as a point of comparison.  Hive insects like bees have a haplodiploid chromosome system for gender determination versus the diploid system we tend to think of as normal.  As far as I know, haplodiploid doesn't exist in any mammal species, only in some insects and rotifers.

---

You may find a fair amount of what you're looking for in a thread I did a while ago on Miqo'te Mating Strategies.  There's a fair amount of good discussion there on many points surrounding this issue.