Abstract
Males often play a critical role in offspring care but the time and energy invested in looking after young can potentially limit their ability to seek out additional mating opportunities. Recent studies, however, suggest that a conflict between male parental effort and mating effort may not always be inevitable, especially if breeding occurs near the nest, or if parental behaviours are under sexual selection. Accordingly, we set out to experimentally investigate male care and courtship in the desert goby Chlamydogobius eremius, a nest-guarding fish with exclusive paternal care. Despite courtship occurring near the nest, we found that when egg-tending males were given the opportunity to attract additional females, they fanned their eggs less often, engaged in shorter fanning bouts, and spent more of their time outside their nests courting. Our findings highlight the importance of understanding the circumstances under which reproductive tradeoffs are expected to occur and how these, in turn, operate to influence male reproductive decisions.
Highlights
Looking after young can be a costly endeavour [1], [2], [3]
Males did not appear to compensate for the reduced time in the nest by fanning more intensely. These results suggest a temporal conflict between male parental effort and mating effort in the desert goby, with males having to choose between leaving the nest to court additional females and remaining inside the nest to provide care for their clutch
The results of our study are consistent with those reported in several other species [4], [24] and provide an interesting contrast to recent work where males were found to increase their paternal effort in the presence of females [12]. These results suggest that patterns of male reproductive investment in care and mating can be difficult to generalise, even among closely-related taxa
Summary
Males often contribute substantially to offspring care, but both the time and energy invested by males can potentially limit their ability to seek out additional mating opportunities (reviewed in [4]). Females are sometimes able to select mates by directly observing the quality of care provided [10], or by using cues that reliably reflect a male’s parental abilities (e.g. the presence of eggs already in the nest; [11]). In this regard, males might even increase their parental effort in the presence of choosy females [10], [12]
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