Black widows as plastic wallflowers: female choosiness increases with indicators of high mate availability in a natural population
| Autor: | Maydianne C. B. Andrade, Catherine Scott, Sean McCann |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2019 |
| Předmět: |
0106 biological sciences
Male Behavioural ecology media_common.quotation_subject lcsh:Medicine 010603 evolutionary biology 01 natural sciences Population density Choice Behavior Article Latrodectus hesperus Sexual Behavior Animal Animals Black Widow Spider Cannibalism 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences 050102 behavioral science & comparative psychology Mating lcsh:Science media_common Population Density Multidisciplinary biology Reproduction 05 social sciences lcsh:R Mating Preference Animal biology.organism_classification Natural population growth Mate choice Sexual selection lcsh:Q Female Demography |
| Zdroj: | Scientific Reports Scientific Reports, Vol 10, Iss 1, Pp 1-9 (2020) |
| ISSN: | 2045-2322 |
| Popis: | Female choice is an important driver of sexual selection, but can be costly, particularly when choosy females risk remaining unmated or experience delays to reproduction. Thus, females should reduce choosiness when mate encounter rates are low. We asked whether choosiness is affected by social context, which may provide reliable information about the local availability of mates. This has been demonstrated in the lab, but rarely under natural conditions. We studied western black widow spiders (Latrodectus hesperus) in the field, placing experimental final-instar immature females so they were either ‘isolated’ or ‘clustered’ near naturally occurring conspecifics (≥10 m or ≤1 m, respectively, from a microhabitat occupied by at least one other female). Upon maturity, females in both treatments were visited by similar numbers of males, but clustered females were visited by males earlier and in more rapid succession than isolated females, confirming that proximity to conspecifics reduces the risk of remaining unmated. As predicted, isolated females were less choosy in staged mating trials, neither rejecting males nor engaging in pre-copulatory cannibalism, in contrast to clustered females. These results demonstrate that exposure of females to natural variation in demography in the field can alter choosiness of adults. Thus, female behaviour in response to cues of local population density can affect the intensity of sexual selection on males in the wild. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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