Projects per year
Abstract
Male same-sex sexual behaviour (SSB), where males court or attempt to
mate with other males, is common among animal taxa. Recent studies have
examined its fitness costs and benefits in attempts to understand its
evolutionary maintenance, but the evolutionary consequences of SSB are
less commonly considered. One potential impact of SSB might be to
facilitate the evolution of traits associated with less sexually
dimorphic males, such as alternative reproductive tactics, by diverting
costly aggression from other males. To test this, we capitalized on the
recent rapid spread of a silent male morph of the field cricket, Teleogryllus oceanicus,
which is unable to produce characteristic male acoustic signals,
benefits from satellite mating behaviour and has feminized appearance
and cuticular hydrocarbon profiles. We tested the prediction that
interactions involving these nonsignalling, less sexually dimorphic male
morphs would show heightened rates of SSB, which could reduce the
strength of male–male competition and permit greater access to females.
We found no evidence that SSB was more common in trials involving silent
males. Instead, SSB was predicted by courtship of females presented
during a pretrial treatment. Our results provide evidence supporting the
view that SSB represents a spillover of sexually selected courtship
behaviour in a nonadaptive context, but do not support a strong role for
SSB in the evolution of less ornamented males in this system.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 5-11 |
Journal | Animal Behaviour |
Volume | 157 |
Early online date | 21 Sept 2019 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Nov 2019 |
Keywords
- Alternative reproductive tactics
- Behavioural syndrome
- Field cricket
- Non-adaptive behaviour
- Same-sex sexual behaviour
- SSB
- Teleogryllus oceanicus
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Dive into the research topics of 'Testing the role of same-sex sexual behaviour in the evolution of alternative male reproductive phenotypes'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 1 Finished
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Genomic Invasion: Genomic Invasion and the Role of Behaviour in Rapid Evolution.
Bailey, N. W. (PI)
1/10/14 → 4/12/20
Project: Standard
Datasets
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Testing the role of same-sex sexual behaviour in the evolution of alternative male reproductive phenotypes (dataset)
Rayner, J. (Creator) & Bailey, N. W. (Contributor), University of St Andrews, 3 Dec 2019
DOI: 10.17630/36c63712-39f9-4aa7-ba37-09aa9459c601
Dataset
File