Comparative evaluation over time during mate choice in the green swordtail Xiphophorus hellerii

Kathryn Bullough, Bram Kuijper and Laura A Kelley

Behavioral Ecology, 2025, vol. 36, issue 5, araf108.

Abstract: During mate choice, choosers are exposed to a variety of sexual signals varying in both magnitude and the environment in which they are experienced. Previous work assumes that choosers evaluate signal variation from potential mates that are simultaneously viewed and compared. However, this is an extreme scenario, and it is important to also consider sequential presentation of mates, as most animals likely experience both scenarios during mate choice. Using green swordtail fish (Xiphophorus hellerii), we assessed whether female preferences for larger males differed when males of different sizes were experienced simultaneously or sequentially. We also investigated the perceptual mechanisms of comparison in both contexts, given recent research suggesting that female preferences are often nonlinear. We found that females consistently preferred larger males, irrespective of whether males were experienced simultaneously or sequentially. However, female preferences were stronger for a male of a given size when viewed under simultaneous, compared with sequential, conditions. During sequential presentation, females compared information from both previously and currently presented males, and interest did not decay with subsequent presentations. Previous research has demonstrated that female green swordtails assessing males simultaneously attend to the relative size difference between males, but we found no evidence of any comparative size assessment. Our study demonstrates that when designing mate choice experiments, it is important to consider how females encounter potential mates in the wild, highlighting that there are clear differences in preferences due to methods of mate presentation and that stochastic adjusting of internal standards of quality frequently occur.

Keywords: cognition; methods; perception; sequential choice; sexual selection; signaling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/araf108 (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:36:y:2025:i:5:p:araf108.

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 ().