Egg investment is influenced by male attractiveness in the mallard

Emma J. A. Cunningham and Andrew F. Russell
Additional contact information
Emma J. A. Cunningham: University of Sheffield
Andrew F. Russell: University of Sheffield

Nature, 2000, vol. 404, issue 6773, 74-77

Abstract: Abstract Why females prefer to copulate with particular males is a contentious issue. Attention is currently focused on whether females choose males on the basis of their genetic quality, in order to produce more viable offspring1. Support for this hypothesis in birds has come from studies showing that preferred males tend to father offspring of better condition or with increased survivorship2,3,4,5,6,7,8. Before attributing greater offspring viability to a male's heritable genetic quality, however, it is important to discount effects arising from confounding sources, including maternal effects. This has generally been addressed by comparing offspring viability from two different breeding attempts by the same female: one when offspring are sired by a preferred male, and one when offspring are sired by a less preferred male. However, here we show that individual female mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) lay larger eggs after copulating with preferred males and smaller eggs after copulating with less preferred males. As a result, females produced offspring of better body condition when paired with preferred males. After controlling for these differences in maternal investment, we found no effect of paternity on offspring condition. This shows that differences between half-sibs cannot always be attributed to paternal or maternal genetic effects.

Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/35003565 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:404:y:2000:i:6773:d:10.1038_35003565

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/35003565

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().