Dataset Information

Female genomic response to mate information.

ABSTRACT: Females should be choosier than males about prospective mates because of the high costs of inappropriate mating decisions. Both theoretical and empirical studies have identified factors likely to influence female mate choices. However, male-male social interactions also can affect mating decisions, because information about a potential mate can trigger changes in female reproductive physiology. We asked how social information about a preferred male influenced neural activity in females, using immediate early gene (IEG) expression as a proxy for brain activity. A gravid female cichlid fish (Astatotilapia burtoni) chose between two socially equivalent males and then saw fights between these two males in which her preferred male either won or lost. We measured IEG expression levels in several brain nuclei including those in the vertebrate social behavior network (SBN), a collection of brain nuclei known to be important in social behavior. When the female saw her preferred male win a fight, SBN nuclei associated with reproduction were activated, but when she saw her preferred male lose a fight, the lateral septum, a nucleus associated with anxiety, was activated instead. Thus social information alone, independent of actual social interactions, activates specific brain regions that differ significantly depending on what the female sees. In female brains, reproductive centers are activated when she chooses a winner, and anxiety-like response centers are activated when she chooses a loser. These experiments assessing the role of mate-choice information on the brain using a paradigm of successive presentations of mate information suggest ways to understand the consequences of social information on animals using IEG expression.

SUBMITTER: Desjardins JK

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3000301 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Female genomic response to mate information.

Desjardins Julie K JK Klausner Jill Q JQ Fernald Russell D RD

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20101124 49

Females should be choosier than males about prospective mates because of the high costs of inappropriate mating decisions. Both theoretical and empirical studies have identified factors likely to influence female mate choices. However, male-male social interactions also can affect mating decisions, because information about a potential mate can trigger changes in female reproductive physiology. We asked how social information about a preferred male influenced neural activity in females, using im ...[more]

PMID: 21106763

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Project description:Male songbirds use song to advertise their attractiveness as potential mates, and the properties of those songs have a powerful influence on female mate preferences. One idea is that males may exert themselves maximally in each song performance, consistent with female evaluation and formation of mate preferences being the primary contributors to mate choice. Alternatively, males may modulate their song behaviour to different degrees in the presence of different females, consistent with both male and female mate preferences contributing to mutual mate choice. Here we consider whether male Bengalese finches, Lonchura striata domestica, express mate preferences at the level of individual females, and whether those preferences are manifest as changes in song behaviour that are sufficient to influence female mate choice. We tested this idea by recording songs performed by individual unmated males during a series of 1 h interactions with each of many unmated females. Across recording sessions, males systematically varied both the quantity and the quality of the songs that they performed to different females. Males also varied their song properties throughout the course of each interaction, and behavioural tests using female birds revealed that songs performed at the onset of each interaction were significantly more attractive than songs performed by the same male later during the same interaction. This demonstration of context-specific variation in the properties of male reproductive signals and a role for that variation in shaping female mate preference reveals that male mate preferences play an important role in mutual mate choice in this species. Because these birds thrive so well in the laboratory and are so amenable to observation and experimentation across generations, these results yield a new model system that may prove especially advantageous in disentangling the role of male and female mate preferences in shaping mutual mate choice and its long-term benefits or consequences.

Dataset Information

Female genomic response to mate information.

Publications

Female genomic response to mate information.

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