An intersexual conflict arises when males and females differ in their reproductive interests. Although experimental studies have shown that females often mate with dominant males, it may not always be in the interest of a female to do so. Here we investigated the impact of male dominance on female mate choice and offspring growth and survival in the rose bitterling (Rhodeus ocellatus), a freshw...

Explaining the factors that determine the distribution of mating success among males is essential to our understanding of sexual selection. Classic theory has focused on how competition among males and female choice for traits of the male or his territory drive sexual selection. Recent theory has also shown that female mate choice copying can alter the strength and direction of selection on mal...

Male and female interests can differ profoundly regarding quality and quantity of mates. Especially in promiscuous mating systems, males often inflict costs on females that may precipitate in negative fitness consequences. In reality, however, discerning between female costs arising from a sexual conflict and costs arising from female mate choice is not trivial. In livebearing fishes, for examp...

The relative importance of direct and indirect benefits models of mate choice is a central question in sexual selection, but separating the two models is very difficult because high quality males often provide both better direct benefits and better genes. In tree crickets, Oecanthus nigricornis, females have the opportunity to gain both directly and indirectly from mate choice. Female tree cric...

Dynamic sexual signals often show a diel rhythm and may vary substantially with time of day. Diel and short-term fluctuations in such sexual signals pose a puzzle for condition capture models of mate choice, which assume a female preference for male traits that reliably reflect a male's quality. Here we experimentally manipulated the food supply of individual male field crickets Gryllus campest...

Ever since Darwin (1871), the peacock’s train has been cited as the icon of an extravagant conspicuous secondary sexual trait that has evolved through female mate choice. However, Takahashi et al. (2008) recently challenged this idea. They monitored female mate choice during 7 years in a feral peafowl, Pavo cristatus, population in Japan and found no correlation between male mating success and ...

Mate selection can be stressful; time spent searching for mates can increase predation risk and/or decrease food consumption, resulting in elevated stress hormone levels. Both high predation risk and low food availability are often associated with increased variation in mate choice by females, but it is not clear whether stress hormone levels contribute to such variation in female behavior. We ...

The extent and importance of female mate fidelity in polygynous mating systems are poorly known. Fidelity may contribute to high variance in male reproductive success when it favors attractive mates or may stabilize social interactions if females are faithful to mating sites rather than males. Using 12 years of data on genetic mate choice in the cooperatively lekking lance-tailed manakin (Chiro...

Female mate choice is fundamental to sexual selection, and determining molecular underpinnings of female preference variation is important for understanding mating character evolution. Previously it was shown that whole-brain expression of a synaptic plasticity marker, neuroserpin, positively correlates with mating bias in the female choice poeciliid, Xiphophorus nigrensis, when exposed to cons...