Mate choice and sexual size dimorphism, not personality, explain female aggression and sexual cannibalism in raft spiders
| Autor: | Tjaša Lokovšek, Matjaž Kuntner, Tatjana Čelik, Klemen Candek, Mark A. Elgar, Simona Kralj-Fišer, Ren-Chung Cheng |
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| Rok vydání: | 2016 |
| Předmět: |
0106 biological sciences
05 social sciences Foraging Zoology Context (language use) Biology biology.organism_classification 010603 evolutionary biology 01 natural sciences Sexual dimorphism Dolomedes Mate choice Sexual cannibalism Agonistic behaviour 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Animal Science and Zoology 050102 behavioral science & comparative psychology Mating Social psychology Ecology Evolution Behavior and Systematics |
| Zdroj: | Animal Behaviour. 111:49-55 |
| ISSN: | 0003-3472 |
| Popis: | Intersexual agonistic encounters prior to mating are thought to result from the ‘spillover’ of the advantages of a voracious personality within a foraging context that is maladaptive in a mating context. We tested this idea by examining the repeatability and cross-context consistency of aggressive behaviours associated with foraging and mating in the raft spider, Dolomedes fimbriatus, in which some, highly voracious females reportedly kill approaching males and thus remain unmated. We failed to find support for a maladaptive spillover of voracious female personality. While females exhibited consistent interindividual differences in voracity towards prey, voracity did not correlate with female aggressiveness towards males. Instead, we show that female D. fimbriatus adjusted their tendency to attack courting males according to their size relative to the male. Females commonly attacked males during or after copulation, but sexual cannibalism depended on relative mate size difference, with mating success tending to be compromised in females with lower body weight. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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