Trade-off between mate choice speed and decision accuracy under mating competition in female sand gobies
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ARTICLE
Trade‑off between mate choice speed and decision accuracy under mating competition in female sand gobies Beatriz Diaz Pauli1 · Kai Lindström2 Received: 18 December 2019 / Accepted: 20 August 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Variation in female mating performance can affect the direction and rate of evolution through sexual selection. The social environment determines the availability of mates and the competitive situation, and hence can influence mating strategies. However, these effects have to be considered within time constraints. Here we show that female sand gobies exposed to samesex competitors (female-biased adult sex ratio, ASR) for a week before having physical access to males (i.e., a delayed male access; referred as prior exposure treatment) were more actively associated with the preferred male and took faster spawning decisions. However, these females mated more frequently with males with traits that did not ensure high egg survival. On the other extreme, females exposed to low same sex competition (male-biased ASR) simultaneously to the mate choice (i.e., an immediate access to males; referred as simultaneous exposure treatment) took more time to make their spawning decision. They also associated and spawned more often with males with good parental skills (i.e., males exhibiting more egg fanning behaviour). These male traits are associated with higher survival and better development of eggs. Our results provide experimental support for a trade-off between mate choice accuracy and speed, which depended on mating competition. Keywords Mate choice · Adult sex ratio · Parental care · Mating decision · Mate sampling · Pomatoschistus minutus
Introduction Variation in mating behaviour can affect evolution through sexual selection (Jennions and Petrie 1997), which depends on intersexual choice and intrasexual competition (Darwin 1871; Andersson 1994). In many species, changes in the social environment, i.e., availability of mates and competitors for those mates, can occur quickly in space and time (Forsgren et al. 2004; Ogburn et al. 2014), and lead to different behavioural responses (Kokko and Rankin 2006; AhKing and Gowaty 2016). Studies on the context-dependency of female mate choice have focused on either preference for male traits or the time constraints for female mate sampling, but the combination of both are seldom considered * Beatriz Diaz Pauli Beatriz.Diaz‑[email protected] * Kai Lindström [email protected] 1
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Bergen, 5020 Bergen, Norway
Environmental and Marine Biology, Åbo Akademi University, 20500 Turku, Finland
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(Lindström and Lehtonen 2013; Breedveld and Fitze 2015; Henshaw 2018), despite the acknowledged importance of time responses in mate choice (Jennions and Petrie 1997; Castellano et al. 2012; Edward 2015). Our still limited knowledge on how females and males make their mating decisions, would be enhanced by incorporating time constraints into the widely studied contextdependency of female mating decisions (Castellano
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