The Lekking Puzzle

Abstract

Males display diverse behaviours to try to obtain mates. Some male mating tactics, such as lekking, are spectacular because of the behaviours that they involve. Lekking males establish tiny, clustered territories without any resources attractive to females. They perform eye-catching displays, hardly feed, and compete intensely. Here, I describe the challenge that lekking poses to our understanding of the evolution of male mating behaviour. I outline the main hypotheses proposed to explain this behaviour and synthesize the evidence for these hypotheses from empirical tests in wild populations.