Abstract
Despite increasing evidence of the importance of repeatable among-individual differences in behaviour (animal personality) in ecology and evolution, little remains known about the role of animal personalities in sexual selection. Here, we present an investigation of the hypothesis that the personalities of individuals and their sexual partners play a role in different episodes of sexual selection, and the extent to which these effects are modulated by the social environment. We first examined how two repeatable behaviours-exploration and boldness-are associated with pre- and postcopulatory sexual selection in male red junglefowl Gallus gallus, using replicate groups across three experimental sex ratio treatments. We further explored how the social environment modulates relationships between male personality and mating performance, and whether mating is assortative or disassortative with respect to exploration or boldness. Finally, we examined behavioural mechanisms linking personality with mating performance. Across all sex ratios, the fastest and slowest exploring males courted females proportionally less, and faster exploring males associated with females more and received more sexual solicitations. In female-biased groups, the fastest and slowest exploring males experienced the highest mating success and lowest sperm competition intensity. Faster exploring males also obtained more mates in female-biased groups when their competitors were, on average, slower exploring, and the proportion of matings obtained by fast-exploring males decreased with the proportion of fast-exploring males in a group, consistent with negative frequency-dependent sexual selection. While boldness did not predict mating performance, there was a tendency for individuals to mate disassortatively with respect to boldness. Collectively, our results suggest that male exploration can play a role in sexual selection, and that sexual selection on personality is complex and contingent on the social environment.
Highlights
A wide range of animal species show repeatable among-individual variation in behaviours such as exploration, boldness and aggression, a pattern known as animal personality (Carere & Maestripieri, 2013; Dall et al, 2004; Dingemanse et al, 2010; Durkin et al, 2020; Sih, Bell & Johnson, 2004)
Solicitations We investigated whether a male's personality and social status predicted the number of solicitations he received, whether a female's personality and social status predicted the number of times she solicited, and whether sex ratio influenced these relationships (Table S1)
Courtship and harassment We examined whether a male's personality and social status could predict the proportion of his female-directed behaviours that were waltzes and whether sex ratio modulated this relationship (Table S1)
Summary
A wide range of animal species show repeatable among-individual variation in behaviours such as exploration, boldness and aggression, a pattern known as animal personality (Carere & Maestripieri, 2013; Dall et al, 2004; Dingemanse et al, 2010; Durkin et al, 2020; Sih, Bell & Johnson, 2004). Previous work has demonstrated a positive covariance between male performance in pre-and postcopulatory selection in weakly female-biased groups, indicating that socially dominant, aggressive males are favoured, both before and after mating (Collet et al, 2012; McDonald et al, 2017) This relationship emerges as a result of these males being able to mate with more females (higher mating success) and remate with these females more frequently, achieving a higher share of paternity. We hypothesized that pre-and postcopulatory sexual selection would target male personality in a similar way, and we predicted that faster exploring and/or bolder males would attain more mates, have higher rates of remating with the same females and experience lower levels of sperm competition. We considered a scenario in which males fare worse in groups composed primarily of faster exploring and/or bolder males, and a negative frequency-dependent scenario, in which males of a given personality type perform worse with increasing frequency of competitors of similar personality type
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