Meeting Abstract
37.4 Wednesday, Jan. 5 The effect of condition on courtship and parental care in threespine stickleback, Gasterosteus aculeatus KELLY, N.B.*; FOSTER, S.A.; ALONZO, S.H.; Yale University, New Haven; Clark University, Worcester; Yale University, New Haven natasha.kelly@yale.edu
Life history theory suggests that male investment into reproductive behaviours is subject to trade-offs. The resources that a male allocates to reproduction must be balanced against those required for his own self-maintenance. Maximizing reproductive success at the cost of this self-maintenance may increase a male’s fitness in the short term, but will decrease his lifetime fitness at the cost of all the possible future reproductive opportunities missed. Unless the chances of surviving to reproduce again are low, individuals are not expected to devote all their resources to reproduction. For low condition males, who may only survive to a single mating season, the costs of failing to attract a mate and produce offspring (and the benefits of succeeding) are higher than those for high condition males, who may mate during multiple seasons. Hence, low condition males are predicted to invest proportionally more of their resources into mate attraction than high condition males, an investment which can have consequences for female mate choice if low and high condition males become indistinguishable. In species where females receive direct benefits, such as parental care, from their mates, choosing a low condition male who may have few resources to allocate to parental care may have greater fitness costs for a female than choosing a high condition male. Sexual signalling theory predicts that male investment in mate attraction will be either (i) correlated with investment in parental care; a reliable indicator signal for females (Kelly & Alonzo, 2010) or (ii) uncorrelated with investment in parental care in low-condition males; an unreliable signal (Kokko, 1998). Here, we investigate the effect of condition on mate attraction and parental care in the threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus).
