High-ranking alleviates male local competition in lek mating systems.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Giavazzi F
PROVIDER: S-EPMC6185937 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Mate choice is the attempt of an individual to gain higher reproductive fitness by preferring to mate with some individuals and not with others. We studied the role of mate choice in the mating system of the neotropical toad Rhinella arenarum by assessing male reproductive tactics for mate acquisition and the contribution of female choice for pair formation. In a shallow pond in central Argentina, we estimated male mating success and the corresponding reproductive tactics by focal observation. The variation of phenotypic and genotypic traits (size and shape, longevity, vocalization features, heterozygosity) was related to the observed mating success in 110 males. The phonotactic response of 21 reproductive females to conspecific advertisement call features was tested in arena experiments. Mating success was limited to 32 males, pair formation was size-assortative. The dominant reproductive tactics were advertising from call positions near suitable breeding sites and pre-mating fights with intruding males, whereas the interception of amplectant pairs and the displacement of mated males were never observed. Female phonotaxis was directed to conspecific choruses but complex and simple call structures were not distinguished. We conclude that the mating system is a lek combining pre-mating fights among males and female choice of slightly smaller males. Fights interfere with female choice, undermining size-assortative mating. This is a unique system in the R. marina species group, in which interception behavior dominates reproduction.
| S-EPMC9740229 | biostudies-literature
Project description:In many species, courtship displays are reliable signals of male quality, and current hypotheses suggest that these displays allow females to choose males with high cellular function. Environmental stressors generate excess reactive oxygen species (ROS) that impair cellular function, and thus antioxidant pathways that remove ROS are probably critical for preserving complex sexual behaviours. Here, we test the hypothesis that enhanced antioxidant activity in mitochondria preserves mating performance following oxidative stress. Using a transgenic approach, we directly manipulated mitochondrial antioxidant activity in the Caribbean fruit fly, Anastrepha suspensa, a lek-mating species with elaborate sexual displays and intense sexual selection that is also a model for sterile insect technique programmes. We generated seven transgenic lines that overexpress mitochondrial superoxide dismutase (MnSOD). Radiation is a severe oxidative stressor used to induce sterility for sterile insect programmes. After radiation treatment, two lines with intermediate MnSOD overexpression showed enhanced mating performance relative to wild-type males. These improvements in mating corresponded with reduced oxidative damage to lipids, demonstrating that MnSOD overexpression protects flies from oxidative stress at the cellular level. For lines with improved mating performance, overexpression also preserved locomotor activity, as indicated by a laboratory climbing assay. Our results show a clear link between oxidative stress, antioxidant capacity and male performance. Our work has implications for fundamentally understanding the role of antioxidants in sexual selection, and shows promise for using transgenic approaches to enhance the field performance of insects released for area-wide pest management strategies and improving performance of biological control agents in general.
| S-EPMC6571480 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Lekking males compete for females within and among leks, yet female choice is expected to work differently at each of these spatial scales. We used paternity analyses to examine how lek versus male attributes influence mate choice in the blue-crowned manakin Lepidothrix coronata. We tested the hypotheses that females prefer (i) to mate at larger leks where a larger number of potential mates can be assessed, (ii) to mate with unrelated or highly heterozygous males expected to produce high-quality offspring, (iii) to mate with males that display at higher rates, and that (iv) display honestly reflects male genetic quality. Our results show that (i) males at larger leks are not more likely to sire young, although females nesting close to small leks travel further to reach larger leks, (ii) siring males are not less related to females or more heterozygous than expected, (iii) within a lek, high-display males are more likely to sire young, and (iv) both male heterozygosity and display rate increased with lek size, and as a result display does not reliably reflect male genetic quality across leks. We suggest that female mate choice in this species is probably driven by a Fisherian process rather than adaptive genetic benefits.
| S-EPMC2674486 | biostudies-literature
Project description:How social structure interacts with individual behaviour and fitness remains understudied despite its potential importance to the evolution of cooperation. Recent applications of network theory to social behaviour advance our understanding of the role of social interactions in various contexts. Here we applied network theory to the social system of lek-mating wire-tailed manakins (Pipra filicauda, Pipridae, Aves). We analysed the network of interactions among males in order to begin building a comparative framework to understand where coordinated display behaviour lies along the continuum from solitary to obligately cooperative dual-male displays in the family Pipridae. Network degree (the number of links from a male to others) ranged from 1 to 10, with low mean and high variance, consistent with the theory for the evolution of cooperation within social networks. We also assessed factors that could predict social and reproductive success of males. Four network metrics, degree, eigenvector centrality, information centrality and reach, some of which assess circuitous as well as the shortest (geodesic) paths of male connectivity, predicted male social rise. The duration of a male's territorial tenure during the 4 years of the study predicted his probability of siring offspring.
| S-EPMC2602714 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Although differences in breeding lifespan are an important source of variation in male fitness, the factors affecting the breeding tenure of males have seldom been explored. Here, we use cross-species comparisons to investigate the correlates of breeding lifespan in male mammals. Our results show that male breeding lifespan depends on the extent of polygyny, which reflects the relative intensity of competition for access to females. Males have relatively short breeding tenure in species where individuals have the potential to monopolize mating with multiple females, and longer ones where individuals defend one female at a time. Male breeding tenure is also shorter in species in which females breed frequently than in those where females breed less frequently, suggesting that the costs of guarding females may contribute to limiting tenure length. As a consequence of these relationships, estimates of skew in male breeding success within seasons overestimate skew calculated across the lifetime and, in several polygynous species, variance in lifetime breeding success is not substantially higher in males than in females.
| S-EPMC4046409 | biostudies-other
Project description:Sexual dimorphism in life history traits and their trade-offs is widespread among sexually reproducing animals and is strongly influenced by the differences in reproductive strategies between the sexes. We investigated how intrasexual competition influenced specific life history traits, important to fitness and their trade-offs in the outcrossing nematode Caenorhabditis remanei. Here, we altered the strength of sex-specific selection through experimental evolution with increased potential for intrasexual competition by skewing the adult sex ratio towards either females or males (1:10 or 10:1) over 30 generations and subsequently measured the phenotypic response to selection in three traits related to fitness: body size, fecundity and tolerance to heat stress. We observed a greater evolutionary change in females than males for body size and peak fitness, suggesting that females may experience stronger net selection and potentially harbour higher amounts of standing genetic variance compared to males. Our study highlights the importance of investigating direct and indirect effects of intrasexual competition in both sexes in order to capture sex-specific responses and understand the evolution of sexual dimorphism in traits expressed by both sexes.
| S-EPMC7756511 | biostudies-literature
Project description:In lek mating systems, males aggregate and defend arenas where they display for females; females select and mate with a male and then solely raise their offspring. Generally, female visits and copulations increase and reproductive variance in male mating success declines with lek size. Here we investigate how male display effort changes across a gradient in lek size. We expect male display effort, an energetically expensive activity, will increase with lek size and male rank due to changes in breeding opportunities and competition among males. We test the interaction of male rank and lek size on display effort using the white-bearded manakin, Manacus manacus (Aves: Pipridae), a well-studied species with a wide geographic distribution in the new world tropics. We used mini-video recorders to simultaneously capture female visits and display behaviors of 41 males distributed over 10 leks. We found that overall display effort increased disproportionately with lek size due to males of both high and low ranks increasing their display effort at larger leks. Our results suggest that increased breeding opportunities and intrasexual competition at larger leks result in males of different ranks investing similarly in increased display effort in order to attract females.
| S-EPMC5040435 | biostudies-literature
Project description:In sexually reproducing species, males often experience strong pre- and postcopulatory sexual selection leading to a wide variety of male adaptations. One example is mate guarding, where males prevent females from mating with other males either before or after they (will) have mated themselves. In case social conditions vary short term and in an unpredictable manner and if there is genetic variation in plasticity of mate guarding (i.e., genotype-by-environment interaction, G × E), adaptive behavioral plasticity in mate guarding may evolve. Here, we test for genetic variation in the plasticity of precopulatory mate-guarding behavior in the lek-mating lesser wax moth Achroia grisella. When offered two females in rapid succession, virgin males of this species usually copulate around 10-20 min with the first female. With the second female, however, they engage in copulation posture for many hours until they have produced another spermatophore, an unusual behavior among insects possibly functioning as precopulatory mate guarding. Previous studies showed the mating latency with the second female to be shorter under higher perceived sperm competition risk. We accordingly measured the mate-guarding behavior of males from six inbred lines under either elevated perceived male-male competition risk or under control conditions allowing us to test for G × E interactions. We found significant inbred line-by-competitor treatment interactions on mating latency and copulation duration with the second female suggesting genetic variation in the degree of behavioral plasticity. However, we found no significant G × E interaction on the sum of mating latency and copulation duration. Our results suggest a potential for adaptive evolution of mate-guarding plasticity in natural populations of lek-mating species. Future studies using selection experiments and experimental evolution approaches in laboratory populations, or comparisons of multiple natural populations will be helpful to study under which conditions plasticity in male mate-guarding behavior evolves.
| S-EPMC7663981 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundHeliconius butterflies possess a remarkable diversity of phenotypes, physiologies, and behaviors that has long distinguished this genus as a focal taxon in ecological and evolutionary research. Recently Heliconius has also emerged as a model system for using genomic methods to investigate the causes and consequences of biological diversity. One notable aspect of Heliconius diversity is a dichotomy in mating systems which provides an unusual opportunity to investigate the relationship between sexual selection and the evolution of reproductive proteins. As a first step in pursuing this research, we report the generation and analysis of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from the male accessory gland of H. erato and H. melpomene, species representative of the two mating systems present in the genus Heliconius.ResultsWe successfully sequenced 933 ESTs clustering into 371 unigenes from H. erato and 1033 ESTs clustering into 340 unigenes from H. melpomene. Results from the two species were very similar. Approximately a third of the unigenes showed no significant BLAST similarity (E-value <10-5) to sequences in GenBank's non-redundant databases, indicating that a large proportion of novel genes are expressed in Heliconius male accessory glands. In both species only a third of accessory gland unigenes were also found among genes expressed in wing tissue. About 25% of unigenes from both species encoded secreted proteins. This includes three groups of highly abundant unigenes encoding repetitive proteins considered to be candidate seminal fluid proteins; proteins encoded by one of these groups were detected in H. erato spermatophores.ConclusionThis collection of ESTs will serve as the foundation for the future identification and evolutionary analysis of male reproductive proteins in Heliconius butterflies. These data also represent a significant advance in the rapidly growing collection of genomic resources available in Heliconius butterflies. As such, they substantially enhance this taxon as a model system for investigating questions of ecological, phenotypic, and genomic diversity.
| S-EPMC2621208 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Aedes aegypti is an important disease vector and a major target of reproductive control efforts. We manipulated the opportunity for sexual selection in populations of Ae. aegypti by controlling the number of males competing for a single female. Populations exposed to higher levels of male competition rapidly evolved higher male competitive mating success relative to populations evolved in the absence of competition, with an evolutionary response visible after only five generations. We also detected correlated evolution in other important mating and life-history traits, such as acoustic signalling, fecundity and body size. Our results indicate that there is ample segregating variation for determinants of male mating competitiveness in wild populations and that increased male mating success trades-off with other important life-history traits. The mating conditions imposed on laboratory-reared mosquitoes are likely a significant determinant of male mating success in populations destined for release.
| S-EPMC6571471 | biostudies-literature