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Bolder guppies do not have more mating partners, yet sire more offspring.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND:Intra-individual stable but inter-individually variable behaviours, i.e. personalities, are commonly reported across diverse animal groups, yet the reasons for their maintenance remain controversial. Therefore, studying fitness consequences of personality traits is necessary to discriminate between alternative explanations. RESULTS:Here, I measured boldness, a highly repeatable personality trait, and reproductive success in male guppies, Poecilia reticulata. I found that bolder males had higher reproductive success than their shyer conspecifics and they sired offspring with females who had larger clutches. CONCLUSIONS:This result provides direct evidence for fitness consequences of boldness in the guppy. It suggests that the effect may be driven by bolder males mating with more fecund females.

SUBMITTER: Herdegen-Radwan M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6857137 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Bolder guppies do not have more mating partners, yet sire more offspring.

Herdegen-Radwan Magdalena M

BMC evolutionary biology 20191114 1

<h4>Background</h4>Intra-individual stable but inter-individually variable behaviours, i.e. personalities, are commonly reported across diverse animal groups, yet the reasons for their maintenance remain controversial. Therefore, studying fitness consequences of personality traits is necessary to discriminate between alternative explanations.<h4>Results</h4>Here, I measured boldness, a highly repeatable personality trait, and reproductive success in male guppies, Poecilia reticulata. I found tha ...[more]

PMID: 31726971

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Project description:In biology, economics, and politics, distributive power is the key for understanding asymmetrical relationships and it can be obtained by force (dominance) or trading (leverage). Whenever males cannot use force, they largely depend on females for breeding opportunities and the balance of power tilts in favour of females. Thus, males are expected not only to compete within their sex-class but also to exchange services with the opposite sex. Does this mating market, described for humans and apes, apply also to prosimians, the most ancestral primate group? To answer the question, we studied a scent-oriented and gregarious lemur, Propithecus verreauxi (sifaka), showing female dominance, promiscuous mating, and seasonal breeding. We collected 57 copulations involving 8 males and 4 females in the wild (Berenty Reserve, South Madagascar), and data (all occurrences) on grooming, aggressions, and marking behaviour. We performed the analyses via exact Spearman and matrix correlations. Male mating priority rank correlated with the frequency of male countermarking over female scents but not with the proportion of fights won by males over females. Thus, males competed in an olfactory tournament more than in an arena of aggressive encounters. The copulation frequency correlated neither with the proportion of fights won by males nor with the frequency of male countermarking on female scents. Male-to-female grooming correlated with female-to-male grooming only during premating. Instead, in the mating period male-to-female grooming correlated with the copulation frequency. In short, the biological market underwent seasonal fluctuations, since males bargained grooming for sex in the mating days and grooming for itself in the premating period. Top scent-releasers gained mating priority (they mated first) and top groomers ensured a higher number of renewed copulations (they mated more). In conclusion, males maximize their reproduction probability by adopting a double tactic and by following market fluctuations.

Dataset Information

Bolder guppies do not have more mating partners, yet sire more offspring.

Publications

Bolder guppies do not have more mating partners, yet sire more offspring.

Similar Datasets

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