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

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...

Bower Size and Male Reproductive Success in a Cichlid Fish Lek

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...

Mating success of resident versus non-resident males in a territorial butterfly

Male-male competition over territorial ownership suggests that winning is associated with considerable benefits. In the speckled wood butterfly, Pararge aegeria, males fight over sunspot territories on the forest floor; winners gain sole residency of a sunspot, whereas losers patrol the forest in search of females. It is currently not known whether residents experience greater mating success th...

Hormonal anticipation of territorial challenges in cichlid fish.

In many territorial species androgens respond to social interactions. This response has been interpreted as a mechanism for adjusting aggressive motivation to a changing social environment. Therefore, it would be adaptive to anticipate social challenges and reacting to their clues with an anticipatory androgen response to adjust agonistic motivation to an imminent social challenge. Here we test...