open access

https://hdl.handle.net/2115/71152

Male guppies change courtship behaviour in response to their own quality relative to that of a rival male

英語

sexual selection

2016-08

Elsevier

Animal behaviour

118

33-37

Compared with female mate choice, male mate choice has been an important but minor topic in the past two decades. In the guppy, Poecilia reticulata, a male approaching a female abandons his courtship when a rival male appears next to the focal female; however, the effect of the relative quality of the males on this behavioural change is unknown. We show here that male guppies abandon their approach to a female only when the rival male is phenotypically superior. Both natural and artificially induced brightly coloured males continued to approach a female even when the rival male was brightly coloured, but both natural and induced dull-coloured males abandoned their approach to a female when the rival was brightly coloured. Males decided their behaviours on the basis of their own appearance, not on their genotypes, because artificially induced brightly and dull- coloured brothers differed in their behaviour. Our results show that male mate choice behaviour is finely tuned to maximize the probability of acceptance by the approached female. (C) 2016 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

学術雑誌論文

Accepted Manuscript

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

© 2016. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

0003-3472