Affiliation:
1. Institute for Integrative Bird Behavior Studies, Biology Department, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795, USA
Abstract
There is increasing evidence that animals can acquire mate preferences through the use of public information, notably by observing (and copying) the mate preferences of others in the population. If females acquire preferences through social mechanisms, sexual selection could act very rapidly to spread the preference and drive elaboration of the preferred trait(s). Although there are reports of ‘mate-choice copying’ in polygynous species, there is no clear evidence for this process in monogamous species. Here, we investigated whether adult female zebra finches
Taeniopygia guttata
can socially acquire sexual preferences for individual males and, in a separate study, for a generalized trait (coloured leg bands) of males. In both studies, test females observed males in two simultaneous conditions: a (‘chosen’) mixed-sex situation in which a male was paired with a (model) female, and a (‘unchosen’) same-sex situation in which a male was paired with another male. In the first experiment, after two weeks of females observing males, test females significantly preferred individual males who had been paired with another female (i.e. chosen males). In the second experiment, test females significantly preferred novel males that were wearing the same leg band colour as the apparently chosen males. Our findings are consistent with the conclusion that female zebra finches' mate preferences are altered by public information. Our study implies that mate preferences can spread rapidly through populations by social mechanisms, affecting the strength of sexual selection in a monogamous species.
Subject
General Agricultural and Biological Sciences,General Environmental Science,General Immunology and Microbiology,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology,General Medicine
Cited by
72 articles.
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