Sexual selection, social information and male mate choice in a promiscuous fish
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Compared to female mate choice, relatively little is known about male mate choice and the selective pressures that shape it.My thesis focuses on the influence of available and inexpensive social information on male mating behaviour, including mate choice.To gain insights into the influence of the social environment on male mating behaviour, I carried out seven experimental studies using a promiscuous fish, the Trinidadian guppy (Poecilia reticulata), as a model species.I used guppies from the low-predation, Upper Aripo River in Trinidad.In dichotomous choice tests, females in this population demonstrated a strong mating preference for large males and a weaker, but significant, preference for males with greater amounts of colour ornamentation.In the absence of sexual rivals, male guppies exhibited an overall preference for large females, but with consistent and repeatable inter-individual variation in both mating effort and mate choice.When conspecific males were present, male guppies paid attention to their social environment and, when given the opportunity, copied the mate choice of a nearby sexual rival.In theory, males should adjust their mating behaviour so as to minimize the potential costs of being copied.As expected, males decreased their preference for an initially preferred female in the presence of a larger, more competitive sexual rival.They also decreased their overall mating effort and used less conspicuous, but also less successful, sneak mating attempts in the presence of an audience of one or two rivals.Since the social environment can influence male mating behaviour and thus mating success, males should strategically associate with sexual rivals in a manner that will enhance their own reproductive success.Here, males preferred to socially associate with conspecific males who they had seen actively performing courtship displays towards a female compared to Preface Co-authorship Statement for Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8Of the seven data chapters in my thesis, Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 have been published in peer-reviewed journals and Chapter 8 is currently under review by a peer-reviewed journal.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".