Display above courts of White‐throated manakins: A new view about its display behavior

Abstract

AbstractIn order to breed successfully, organisms exhibit multiple strategies to enhance mate attraction, such as elaborate physical ornamentation, behavioral courtship displays, and social interactions, leading to competition or cooperation among potential mates. Within lek mating systems, species evolve under strong sexual selection, which promotes the evolution of exaggerated sexual traits such as male courtship displays. The White‐throated manakin, Corapipo gutturalis, is a small Neotropical bird mating in leks where males display courtships to attract females. Their displays commonly take place on fallen logs on the forest floor, but there are descriptions of displays on higher forest stratum above the typical logs. In this study, we aimed at adding new behavioral information on the above‐log displays and to compare them to log displays in their potential to attract females. For this, we conducted focal observations on seven display courts in two reproductive seasons for 193 hr and recorded above‐log displays in four of the seven observed courts. Above‐log displays were always performed in groups of up to four males from multiple ages and, on only two occasions, these displays ended on the display log. We recorded the same elements previously described during above‐log displays for the species, besides the side‐to‐side slide that had not yet been registered for the species. Above‐log displays included more males than log displays. However, there was no significant difference in the frequency of females visits to above‐log displays or log displays and, likewise, the number of males engaging in the above‐log displays did not determine female visits either. Thus, we found no evidence that above‐log displays are more effective at attracting females than those on the log display. Since above‐log displays are always in the presence of multiple males, we suggest that it may represent male–male competition to define male individuals accessing the display logs.