In humans, polygamy is the practice of marrying multiple spouses. When a man is married to more than one wife at the same time, sociologists call this polygyny. When a woman is married to more than one husband at a time, it is called polyandry. In sociobiology and zoology, researchers use polygamy in a broad sense to mean any form of multiple mating, such as: * Polygyny: one male lives and mates with multiple females but each female only mates with a single male. * Systems where several females mate with several males are defined either as promiscuity or polygynandry. * Lek mating is frequently regarded as a form of polygyny, because one male mates with many females, but lek-based mating systems differ in that the male has no attachment to the females with whom he mates, and that mating females lack attachment to one another. ## Examples - [[vegetarian birds are more sociable than insect eaters|vegetarian songbirds]] often have polygamous breeding behavior, pairing with multiple mates during each season.