Is male care compromised by additional mating opportunity

By M. Magrath, J. Komdeur. 2003

215 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In many animals, males contribute substantially to caring for their young but also have the opportunity to enhance their reproductive success by attracting additional mates or by seeking copulations with females that are already paired to other males. Sometimes, the opportunity to gain these additional matings coincides with periods when males are providing parental care. At such times, males might be expected to allocate time and effort to these alternative behaviours in a way that maximizes their overall reproductive success. But do they? Here, we examine the recent evidence for a tradeoff between parental effort and additional mating effort and highlight some of the factors that might influence how this conflict is resolved. We conclude that, in spite of the paucity of comprehensive studies, this tradeoff has a potentially important and often overlooked influence on parental behaviour in a range of taxa.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Gender Studies, Reproductive Medicine

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/41c01576b682b4d4114ddef997c623cea9d029f7

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Gender Studies

In Reproductive Medicine

Hanna Kokko

Citations in the corpus

Sexual selection for male parental care in the sand goby, Pomatoschistus minutus (2006, background): “Whether this elaboration continues depends on the mating system, resource distribution (Magrath and Komdeur 2003), and life-history costs of care (Gross 2005).”
Mate guarding, male attractiveness, and paternity under social monogamy (2005, background): “Females or males may follow adaptive rules of differential allocation where their reproductive effort and mating effort depend on the attractiveness, or quality, of their mate and themselves (reviewed in Magrath and Komdeur, 2003; Sheldon, 2000).”
Extrapair Paternity and Sexual Selection in Socially Monogamous Birds: Are Tropical Birds Different? (2008, background): “…similarly to temperate-region birds�� Comparative tests of the female-constraint hypothesis are complicated by the fact that the relative benefits to males of parental care versus EPP also will li�ely vary across species (Magrath and Komdeur 2003)�� Consequently, an interspecific correlation…”
Insights for Behavioral Ecology from Behavioral Syndromes. (2008, background): “Another well‐studied trade‐off is between parental care and mate attraction:males that spendmore timeattractingmatesor seekingEPCsprovide less parental care (Bjelvenmark and Forsgren, 2003; Clark and Galef, 1999; De Ridder et al., 2000; Duckworth et al., 2003; Kokko, 1998; Magrath and Elgar, 1997; M”
Male sexual attractiveness and parental effort in blue tits: A test of the differential allocation hypothesis (2005, background): “However, can this assumption be substantiated? If the males also interacted with neighbours and received feedback about an altered dominance/attractiveness from these, this could in theory result in a situation where UVC males spent more time in territorial disputes and/or pursuing additional mating”
Lonely hearts or sex in the city? Density-dependent effects in mating systems (2006, background): “There is ample empirical support that low availability of mating partners can constrain the benefits of deserting the current brood (Magrath & Komdeur 2003; Wiebe 2005; see also Härdling & Kaitala 2004).”