The role of male quality in sequential mate choice: pregnancy replacement in small mammals?

Abstract

Females mainly increase their reproductive success by improving the quality of their mates and need to be discriminative in their mate choices. Here, we investigate whether female mammals can trade up sire quality in sequential mate choice during already progressed pregnancies. A male-induced pregnancy termination (functional 'Bruce effect') could thus have an adaptive function in mate choice as a functional part of a pregnancy replacement. We used bank voles (Myodes glareolus) as a model system and exchanged the breeding male in the early second trimester of a potential pregnancy. Male quality was determined using urine marking values. Females were offered a sequence of either high- then low-quality male (HL) or a low- then high-quality male (LH). The majority of females bred with high-quality males independent of their position in the sequence, which may indicate a pregnancy replacement in LH but not in HL. The body size of the second male, which could have been related to the coercion of females by males into remating, did not explain late pregnancies. Thus, pregnancy replacement, often discussed as a counterstrategy to infanticide, may constitute adaptive mate choice in female mammals, and female choice may induce pregnancy replacement in mammals.