Sexual cannibalism and mate choice
By John Prenter, C. Macneil, R. W. Elwood. Animal Behaviour, 2006
103 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Sexual cannibalism, where a female kills and consumes a courting male, represents an extreme form of sexual conflict and has been proposed as a mechanism of mate choice. We evaluate the evidence for mate choice through premating sexual cannibalism via mate rejection, other indirect mechanisms of mate ‘choice’ and choice in postmating sexual cannibalism. We highlight a paucity of investigations, particularly of field studies, and note gaps in our knowledge. There is empirical support for the size-dependent sexual cannibalism predicted by mate choice through premating sexual cannibalism. This may represent mate choice operating on absolute male size but it could be a by-product of female foraging behaviour and greater vulnerability of relatively smaller males. Thus, indirect mate choice is as plausible an explanation of size-dependent sexual cannibalism as is direct mate choice based on discrimination of male traits. Direct female choice, mediated through premating sexual cannibalism, has yet to be demonstrated. We suggest a framework for distinguishing direct and indirect choice and note an absence of information on which to test it. There is evidence for sequential mate choice in postmating sexual cannibalism, but the nature or basis of the female's discriminatory behaviour remains unclear. Costs and long-term fitness benefits of the putative mate choice have been largely ignored. Reversed sexual cannibalism, in which the male eats the female, presumably occurs when the gain from food is high and potential gain from mating low and probably has little to do with mate choice.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2020bd482c423e2c5260098821ba3f613fc9a6c2
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
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Citations in the corpus
- Preference for male traits in female wolf spiders varies with the choice of available males, female age and reproductive state (2007, background): “Therefore, tufts above or below a threshold size may inform a female’s decision to mate or to feed upon a male, a form of indirect mate choice (Johnson 2005; Prenter et al. 2006).”
- Sexual conflict over copulation duration in a cannibalistic spider (2006, background): “Postinsemination sexual cannibalism occurs regularly during mating in a number of spider species (Elgar 1992) and can result in prolonged copulations (reviewed in Elgar 1998; Elgar & Schneider 2004; Prenter et al. 2006).”
- Genital damage in the orb-web spider Argiope bruennichi (Araneae: Araneidae) increases paternity success (2007, background): “Sexual cannibalism is expected to exert a strong selective force on males (reviewed by Elgar and Schneider 2005; Prenter et al. 2006) although to date only few studies identified male strategies that prevent a successful female attack (Moya-Laraño et al.”