Expression of pre- and postcopulatory traits under different dietary conditions in guppies

Alessandro Devigili, Jennifer L. Kelley, Andrea Pilastro and Jonathan P. Evans

Behavioral Ecology, 2013, vol. 24, issue 3, 740-749

Abstract: Sexual selection can operate both before and after mating. For males, selection will favor a suite of traits involved in mate acquisition (precopulatory) and in the competition among ejaculates to fertilize eggs (postcopulatory). Sperm competition theory predicts a trade-off between investment in pre- and postcopulatory traits, thus generating negative correlations between traits that function during both episodes of selection. However, such trade-offs can be difficult to detect because they are typically sensitive to the pool of resources available for allocation to competing functions. Although theory predicts that trade-offs will be more apparent when resources are limiting, there have been few attempts to test this prediction. In our study, we used the freshwater fish, Poecilia reticulata, to examine how both pre- and postcopulatory sexually selected traits simultaneously respond to manipulations of diet quantity by comparing behavioral, ornamental, and ejaculate traits between males assigned at random to either a ad libitum or a restricted food diet. We also explore how the relationships between traits that function during pre- and postcopulatory episodes of selection are affected by these treatments. Our results reveal that diet manipulations influenced the expression of both precopulatory (sexual behavior and ornamentation) and postcopulatory sexually selected traits (sperm viability), reinforcing the importance of resource acquisition in sexual selection. However, our data do not support the hypothesis that males trade off their allocation toward these pre- and postcopulatory sexually selected traits. Instead, changes in the expression of pre- and postcopulatory sexually selected traits appear to occur independently.

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/ars204 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:beheco:v:24:y:2013:i:3:p:740-749.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Behavioral Ecology is currently edited by Louise Barrett

More articles in Behavioral Ecology from International Society for Behavioral Ecology Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().