Time and habitat heterogeneity constrain the opportunity for sexual selection during mating

Time and habitat heterogeneity constrain the opportunity for sexual selection during mating

Sexual Selection: Copycat Mating

Female zebra finches may be influenced by the choices of other females when selecting mates, challenging the view that mate-choice copying should not occur in species with biparental care. Choosing a mate is not a simple business. A female needs a male in order to reproduce, but how does she know which one to pick? How can she find a good mate without wasting too much time and effort? One answe...

Sexual selection and mating systems.

Sexual selection is among the most powerful of all evolutionary forces. It occurs when individuals within one sex secure mates and produce offspring at the expense of other individuals within the same sex. Darwin was first to recognize the power of sexual selection to change male and female phenotypes, and, in noting that sexual selection is nonubiquitous, Darwin was also first to recognize the...

Sexual selection can constrain sympatric speciation.

Recent theory has suggested that sympatric speciation can occur quite easily when individuals that are ecologically similar mate assortatively. Although many of these models have assumed that individuals have equal mating success, in nature rare phenotypes may often suffer decreased mating success. Consequently, assortative mating may often generate stabilizing sexual selection. We show that th...

Mating portfolios: bet-hedging, sexual selection and female multiple mating.

Polyandry (female multiple mating) has profound evolutionary and ecological implications. Despite considerable work devoted to understanding why females mate multiply, we currently lack convincing empirical evidence to explain the adaptive value of polyandry. Here, we provide a direct test of the controversial idea that bet-hedging functions as a risk-spreading strategy that yields multi-genera...