Dataset Information

Male age and female mate choice in a synchronizing katydid.

ABSTRACT: In acoustically communicating species, females often evaluate the frequency content, signal duration and the temporal signal pattern to gain information about the age of the signaller. This is different in the synchronizing bush cricket Mecopoda elongata where females select males on the basis of relative signal timing in duets. In a longitudinal approach, we recorded songs of M. elongata males produced 2 weeks (young male) and 9 weeks (old male) after their ultimate moult. Signal timing of both age categories was studied in acoustic interactions, and female preference was investigated in choice situations. Young male chirps were significantly shorter and contained less energy compared to "old chirps". In mixed-age duets younger males timed their chirps as leader significantly more often. Females preferred the young male chirp when broadcast as leader over the old male chirp, but choice was random when the old male chirp was leader. This choice asymmetry was abolished after reducing the duration of the "old chirp". Results were mirrored in response of a bilateral pair of auditory neurons, where the asymmetry in spike count and first-spike latency correlated with behaviour. We suggest that older males may compensate their disadvantage in a more complex chorus situation.

SUBMITTER: Hartbauer M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4511073 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Male age and female mate choice in a synchronizing katydid.

Hartbauer M M Siegert M E ME Römer H H

Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology 20150510 8

In acoustically communicating species, females often evaluate the frequency content, signal duration and the temporal signal pattern to gain information about the age of the signaller. This is different in the synchronizing bush cricket Mecopoda elongata where females select males on the basis of relative signal timing in duets. In a longitudinal approach, we recorded songs of M. elongata males produced 2 weeks (young male) and 9 weeks (old male) after their ultimate moult. Signal timing of both ...[more]

PMID: 25957628

Similar Datasets

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

Male age and female mate choice in a synchronizing katydid.

Publications

Male age and female mate choice in a synchronizing katydid.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets