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Adult males of web‐building spiders often cohabit the webs of sessile sub‐adult (i.e. penultimate instar) females and mate with them as they moult to adults. Often, males accrue benefits from this cohabitation (kleptoparasitism, avoidance of cannibalism, potential polygamy), whereas sub‐adult females may either accrue benefits or incur costs such as curtailed opportunity for mate choice or mate cannibalism...
Sexual selection should favour females that can assess the functional fertility of available sexual partners and avoid mating with recently mated, sperm‐depleted males. Our current understanding of the sensory mechanism(s) underlying female assessment of males based on their functional fertility and avoidance of sperm‐depleted males is incomplete. Female Trinidadian guppies (Poecilia reticulata) are...
Geographic variation in courtship behavior can affect reproductive success of divergent phenotypes via mate choice. Over time, this can lead to reproductive isolation and ultimately to speciation. The Neotropical red‐eyed treefrog (Agalychnis callidryas) exhibits high levels of phenotypic variation among populations in Costa Rica and Panama, including differences in color pattern, body size, and skin...
In a single population of a livebearing fish, the green swordtail (Xiphophorus hellerii), a trait considered a static badge of status in males of other populations, the color of a stripe covering the lateral line, has been found to be dynamic relative to their social environment, potentially rendering this signal meaningless. Males change the color expression of their lateral stripe dynamically based...
Studies of sexual selection in animal systems frequently use courtship and receptivity behaviors as metrics for mating success, and this is generally built upon data associating such behaviors with mating. Spider systems are becoming increasingly popular in sexual selection research, and the wolf spider Gladicosa gulosa has the potential to help answer unique questions in animal communication. However,...
Assortative mating is a reproductive strategy used by a diversity of animals, in which individuals choose a mate that shares similar characteristics. This mating strategy has the potential to promote the evolution of various sexual signals and has been a proposed mechanism driving and maintaining color variation in the anuran family Dendrobatidae. Most studies have examined this reproductive strategy...
In territorial species, rivals investment in fights over territories may increase when the availability of suitable areas for defense is low. This should occur because low territory availability may increase the costs to maintain and acquire territories. Although such process occurs in small spatial scales (local scale), territory availability in larger scales (regional scale) may also affect fighting...
Diurnal and nocturnal activity patterns shown by different species will strongly determine the characteristics of signals as well as the sensory channels used during sexual interactions. Despite this, few studies have experimentally tested the effects of lighting and time of day on courtship characteristics in arthropods. Previous studies have shown that the wolf spider Schizocosa malitiosa can be...
Sexually selected signals are theoretically expected to exhibit heightened condition dependence compared to non‐signaling traits. This link to condition enables sexual signals to provide information regarding individual quality and also provides a mechanism that allows animals to develop signals that accurately reflect their abilities. Most previous work on sexual signal condition dependence has focused...
Conspicuous polymorphism in sexually selected traits is usually attributed to processes such as frequency‐dependent selection that can maintain genetic variation. Recent evidence indicates that dramatic variation of male coloration in guppies (Poecilia reticulata) is promoted by a form of frequency‐dependent selection in which males bearing rare or novel color patterns achieve higher mating success...
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