6. In a variety of species, traits have been described that benefit males when competing for mates but that also harm females as a by-product. Such traits can include behaviours like persistent courtship and attempted mating of females, morphological structures on the male genitalia that help remove sperm of competitor males from the female reproductive tract, and compounds alongside sperm in male seminal fluid that manipulate female fertility and propensity to remate. A student in Prof. Arnqvist's lab at Uppsala University has observed that populations of seed beetles vary in the average harmfulness of their males to females, and proposes that this may be due to variation among populations in mating system because such traits are selected against under conditions of monogamy (when each individual has only one mate on which their entire reproductive success is thus dependent) but can be selected for under conditions of polygamy (i.e. when males and females tend to have multiple mates). The student collected beetles from 12 populations and for each population quantified the average amount of male harm and their mating system (average number of mates per individual). a) Indicate whether this study is descriptive or hypothesis-testing and briefly explain why you consider it to be so.