Abstract
Females prefer male traits that are associated with direct and/or indirect benefits to themselves. Male–male competition also drives evolution of male traits that represent competitive ability. Because female choice and male–male competition rarely act independently, exploring how these two mechanisms interact is necessary for integrative understanding of the evolution of sexually selected traits. Here, we focused on direct and indirect benefits to females from male attractiveness, courtship, and weapon characters in the armed bug Riptortus pedestris. The males use their hind legs to fight other males over territory and perform courtship displays for successful copulation. Females of R. pedestris receive no direct benefit from mating with attractive males. On the other hand, we found that male attractiveness, courtship rate, and weapon size were significantly heritable and that male attractiveness had positive genetic covariances with both courtship rate and weapon traits. Thus, females obtain indirect benefits from mating with attractive males by producing sons with high courtship success rates and high competitive ability. Moreover, it is evident that courtship rate and hind leg length act as evaluative cues of female choice. Therefore, female mate choice and male–male competition may facilitate each other in R. pedestris. This is consistent with current basic concepts of sexual selection.
Highlights
Female mate choice is one of two major mechanisms of sexual selection and is a fundamental and critical force leading to the evolution of behaviors and morphologies [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
In multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) including variables of courtship rate and male weapon size, the reduced model showed that neither courtship rate, male weapon size nor female body size had significant effect on female lifetime reproductive success (LRS) and longevity
The results showed that males preferred by females tended to have a higher frequency of courtship display and larger hind leg (Table 1, Fig. 1)
Summary
Female mate choice is one of two major mechanisms of sexual selection and is a fundamental and critical force leading to the evolution of behaviors and morphologies [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Obvious examples of direct benefit include access to territory, nuptial gifts, and conjoined efforts in parental care for offspring [10,11]. Females can increase their longevity and/or fecundity from the direct benefits [3,12]. Attractive males are themselves of high genetic quality and viability, and the offspring sired by these males inherit the ‘‘good genes’’ [13,16,17,19] In this case, female fitness is indirectly increased through the production of offspring with high viability (reviewed in [13,19])
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