Prior mating success can affect allocation towards future sexual signaling in crickets

, , ,
1 Evolution & Ecology Research Centre, UNSW Australia, Sydney, NSW, Australia
2 Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States of America
3 Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity, University of Muenster, Muenster, Germany
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.481v1
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
Chiswell R, Girard M, Fricke C, Kasumovic M. 2014. Prior mating success can affect allocation towards future sexual signaling in crickets. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e481v1

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.

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.481v1/supp-1