Hotshots, hot spots, and female preference: exploring lek formation models with a bower-building cichlid fish

Bower Size and Male Reproductive Success in a Cichlid Fish Lek

Quantifying mating success of territorial males and sneakers in a bower-building cichlid fish

The strategies and traits males evolve to mate with females are incredible in their diversity. Theory on the evolution of secondary sexual characters suggests that evolving any costly trait or strategy will pay off and stabilise in the population if it is advantageous compared to the alternative less costly strategy, but quantifying the relative success of the two can be difficult. In Lake Mala...

Evolution of bower building in Lake Malawi cichlid fish: phylogeny, morphology, and behavior

*Correspondence: Ryan A. York, Department of Biology, Stanford University, 371 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, USA e-mail: [email protected]; J. Todd Streelman, Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, Georgia Institute of Technology, 310 Ferst Drive, Atlanta, GA 30332-0230, USA e-mail: todd.streelman@ biology.gatech.edu Despite considerable research, we still know little about th...

Sequential female assessment drives complex sexual selection on bower shape in a cichlid fish.

In many animals, sexual selection on male traits results from female mate choice decisions made during a sequence of courtship behaviors. We use a bower-building cichlid fish, Nyassachromis cf. microcephalus, to show how applying standard selection analysis to data on sequential female assessment provides new insights into sexual selection by mate choice. We first show that the cumulative selec...

A role for male bower size as an intrasexual signal in a Lake Malawi cichlid fish

Disruptive sexual selection through female mate choice has been proposed as a key mechanism driving the evolution of haplochromine cichlid fish diversity. Here we investigated if male secondary sexual traits employed by females in direct mate choice have an additional function in male competition. We conducted a field experiment on aggression among males of a lekking Lake Malawi cichlid species...