Lek-like courtship in paper-wasps:‘a prolonged, delicate, and troublesome affair’

Abstract

Abstract Courtship may be ‘a very tedious affair, going on hour after hour.’ With these words two American experts on spiders, George and Elisabeth Peckham (1889, quoted in Cronin 1991), remarked on the long wait for successful matings that characterizes much research on sexual behaviour. Their study was one of the early detailed attempts to test Darwin’s theory of sexual selection by means of a female ‘aesthetic’ choice. They concluded that ‘the males vie with each other in making an elaborate display, not only of their grace and agility, but also of their beauty, and that the females, after attentively watching the dances and tournaments (...), select for their mates the males that they find most pleasing.’ One century later, ‘dancing’ and 'athletic ability' of males in the courtship of fruitflies has been explained as a costly, therefore an honest, signal of mate quality; females mate ‘only with those males that are able to keep up’ with them during the courtship dance (Maynard Smith 1991).