Female crickets are driven to fight by the male courting and calling songs
Crickets have traditional sex roles, where males compete aggressively for access to selective polyandrous females. However, in a laboratory experiment, we found that normally nonaggressive female Gryllus campestris fought each other vigorously in the presence of a courting male, resulting in a dominant female that gained a greater probability of receiving the spermatophore. Female-female fights […]
Adaptively flexible polyandry
Mating theory (Hubbell & Johnson 1987, American Naturalist, 130, 91–112; Gowaty & Hubbell 2009, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A., 106, 10017–10024) says that reproductive decisions of individuals are flexibly expressed and adaptive. It also makes the following five predictions about polyandry. (1) Demography determines within-population, between-female variation in mating rates. That is, […]
Extra-pair paternity confirmed in wild white-handed gibbons
Knowledge of the genetic mating system of animal species is essential for our understanding of the evolution of social systems and individual reproductive strategies. In recent years, genetic methods have uncovered an unexpected diversity of paternal genetic contributions across diverse animal social mating systems, but particularly in pair-living species. In most pair-living birds, for example, […]
Dominance relationships among siamang males living in multimale groups
Intense intolerance among males is considered to be an important mechanism maintaining the uni-male organization traditionally attributed to socially monogamous gibbons. Long-term field work, however, has revealed the existence of stable, socially polyandrous groups in at least two populations, raising questions about the mechanism that allows two adult males to co-reside in the same group. […]