Old females rarely mate with old males in roe deer, Capreolus capreolus

Cécile Vanpé,Petter Kjellander,Jean-Michel Gaillard,Jean-François Lemaître,Erwan Quemere,A J Mark Hewison,Maryline Pellerin

doi:10.1093/biolinnean/blz110

Abstract

Abstract Little is known about whether female mating tactics vary with age based on their preference for mates. To fill this knowledge gap, we examined how maternal age is related to the age of their mates using detailed individual long-term monitoring of a genotyped and pedigreed European roe deer (Capreolus capreolus Linnaeus, 1758) population. We found that mating between old females and prime-aged males was more frequent than mating between prime-aged females and prime-aged males. This suggests that old females avoid old mates. Old females might be more selective in their mate choice than prime-aged females owing to increased mate-sampling effort. Our finding is in line with the terminal investment/allocation hypothesis. The study of age-related variation in female mating behaviour is particularly important because this behaviour can inﬂuence the intensity and direction of sexual selection and the maintenance of variation in male sexually selected traits. Further studies are needed to quantify the exact fitness benefits of age-specific mating tactics in females.

Highlights

Age-specific variation is a general feature of most lifehistory traits in vertebrates (Emlen, 1970; Nussey et al, 2013; Gaillard et al, 2017)
We investigated age-specific variation in female mating tactics with respect to the age of their partner in an intensively monitored population of roe deer, for which a substantial proportion of individuals were genotyped and a multi-generational pedigree was constructed
We found that mating events between old females and prime-aged males were much more frequent than mating events between prime-aged females and primeaged males in roe deer

Summary

Introduction

Age-specific variation is a general feature of most lifehistory traits in vertebrates (Emlen, 1970; Nussey et al, 2013; Gaillard et al, 2017). Performance-related traits, such as reproduction or survival, initially increase with age during early life, reach a plateau during the prime-aged stage (i.e. between the age at first reproduction and the age at the onset of senescence) and decline with increasing. It remains unknown whether mating tactics vary with age in relationship to these changes in performance over the lifetime of an individual. Previous attempts to test this hypothesis in various species have yielded contradictory results (Clutton-Brock, 1984; Descamps et al, 2007; Creighton et al, 2009; Weladji et al, 2010), observations in mammalian females so far appear to be consistent overall with the predictions of terminal allocation/investment (Clutton-Brock, 1984; Ericsson et al, 2001)

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