Prior mating success can affect allocation towards future sexual signaling in crickets
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Entomology, Evolutionary Studies
- Keywords
- Social feedback, sexual selection, sexual signalling, condition dependence, male investment, Teleogryllus commodus
- Copyright
- © 2014 Chiswell et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. Prior mating success can affect allocation towards future sexual signaling in crickets. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e481v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.481v1
Abstract
Fitness is often correlated with the expression level of a sexually selected trait. However, sexually selected traits are costly to express such that investment in their expression should be optimised to maximize their overall fitness gains. Social interactions, in the form of successful and unsuccessful matings, may offer males one type of feedback allowing them to gauge how to allocate their resources towards sexual signalling. Here we tested whether adult male black field crickets (Teleogryllus commodus) modify the extent of their calling effort (the sexually selected trait) in response to successful and unsuccessful matings with females. To examine the effect that mating interactions with females have on investment into sexual signalling, we monitored male calling effort after maturation and then provided males with a female at two points within their life, manipulating whether or not males were able to successfully mate each time. Our results demonstrate that males alter their investment towards sexual signalling in response to successful matings, but only if the experience occurs early their life. Males that mated early in their life decreased their calling effort sooner than males that were denied a mating. Our results demonstrate that social feedback in the form of successful and unsuccessful matings has the potential to alter the effort a male places in sexual signalling.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
Dataset for analyses
Data for the analyses in the paper.