Female preference for male color is necessary and sufficient for assortative mating in 2 cichlid sister species

By O. Selz, M. Pierotti, M. Maan, Corinne Schmid, Ole Seehausen. Behavioral Ecology, 2014

89 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A critical step for speciation in the face of gene flow is the origination of reproductive isolation. The evolution of assortative mating greatly facilitates this process. Assortative mating can be mediated by one or multiple cues across an array of sensory modalities. We here explore possible cues that may underlie female mate choice in a sympatric species pair of cichlid fish from Lake Victoria, Pundamilia pundamilia and Pundamilia nyererei. Previous studies identified species-specific female preferences for male coloration, but effects of other cues could not be ruled out. Therefore, we assessed female choice in a series of experiments in which we manipulated visual (color) and chemical cues. We show that the visibility of differences in nuptial hue (i.e., either blue or red) between males of the 2 species is necessary and sufficient for assortative mating by female mate choice. Such assortment mediated by a single cue may evolve relatively quickly, but could make reproductive isolation vulnerable to environmental changes. These findings confirm the important role of female mate choice for male nuptial hue in promoting the explosive speciation of African haplochromine cichlids.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/92d9697aa392f0183bfd689d599638082958bd8c

Citations in the corpus

• Ancient hybridization fuels rapid cichlid fish adaptive radiations (2017, unknown): “This opsin gene likely also plays a role in behavioural reproductive isolation because divergence in colour perception between species with different LWS opsin genotypes 53 is often associated with divergent male breeding colouration 39,49,54 , which is an important mate choice cue 55 .”