Courtship songs have undergone a spectacular diversification in the Drosophila buzzatii cluster. Accordingly, it has been suggested that sexual selection has played a significant role in promoting rapid diversification, reproductive isolation and speciation. However, there is no direct evidence (i.e., song playback experiments with wingless males) supporting this tenet. Moreover, several studie...

BACKGROUND Behaviors involved in courtship and male-male combat have been recorded in a taxonomically broad sample (76 species in five families) of snakes in the clade Boidae + Colubroidea, but before now no one has attempted to find phylogenetic patterns in such behaviors. Here, we present a study of phylogenetic patterns in such behaviors in snakes. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS From the l...

In many Drosophila species the male courtship song is an essential part of a successful courtship, playing a role in species-recognition and/or in sexual selection exercised by the females on conspecific males. In Drosophila montana, specific traits of the courtship song (the length and the carrier frequency of sound pulses) have earlier been shown to play an important role in intraspecific mat...

Although conspicuous courtship displays are an effective way of attracting the attention of receptive females, they could provide valuable information to rival males on the location of these females. In fiddler crabs, males that see a receptive female wave their single, greatly enlarged claw in a highly conspicuous courtship display. We test whether other males use this courtship display to ale...

143 Words): Sociologists have long argued that the force of a social bond resides in a sense of interpersonal connection. This is especially true for initial courtship encounters when pairs report a sense of interpersonal chemistry. We explore the process of romantic bonding by applying interaction ritual theory, extended and integrated with methods from computational linguistics, to the study ...

Sperm limitation is widespread across many animal species. Several mechanisms of sperm allocation have been proposed, including optimal allocation according to clutch size and equal allocation across females. However, considerably less effort has been directed at investigating the behavioural signals associated with sperm limitation in males, which may include mating rate and the intensity of c...

Since its discovery by Morgan, the Drosophila white gene has become one of the most intensely studied genes and has been widely used as a genetic marker. Earlier reports that over- and misexpression of White protein in Drosophila males leads to male-male courtship implicated white in courtship control. While previous studies suggested that it is the mislocalization of White protein within cells...

Male courtship during copulation is common in insects and spiders, and presumably serves to induce the female to fertilize her eggs with the male’s sperm. Fragmentary observations indicate that in Ditemnus acantholobus, typical male and female roles are reversed. The female courts vigorously and persistently during copulation while keeping one portion of the male’s highly modified pronotum insi...

The purpose of this study was to determine whether there is a relationship between marital satisfaction (as measured by the Dyadic Adjustment Scale; Spanier, 1976) and the independent variables of age, education level, and courtship length (parsed into preand post-engagement periods). Respondents (N = 60) were required to complete surveys online regarding their experiences in their marriages. R...

Male courtship in Drosophila melanogaster is a robust innate behavior that is shaped by sensory input and experience. It is regulated by the general sex-determination pathway through the sex-specific forms of fruitless and doublesex. Recent findings have shown that both fruitless and doublesex are required for courtship. This chapter reviews the role of these proteins and the neurons that expre...