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Sexual voyeurs and copiers: social copying and the audience effect on male mate choice in the guppy

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Abstract

In most mating systems, males and females are commonly within signalling and receiving distance of conspecifics during courtship and mating activities. Although it is well known that females who observe sexual interactions between conspecifics will use public information obtained from these interactions when making their own mating decisions, much less is known about whether males use this type of information in making mating decisions. We used the Trinidadian guppy (Poecilia reticulata) to test whether males use public information to (i) copy the apparent mate choice of another male and (ii) modify their mating preference for a given female in the presence of one or two sexual rivals (potential copiers). We show that males use public information to copy the mate choice of other males and that males alter their mating preferences in response to the presence of an audience of sexual rivals, but find no evidence of a stronger audience effect when the number of sexual rivals increases. Collectively, these results indicate that males pay attention to their immediate social environment in making mating decisions and suggest that they avoid having another male copy their mate choice by weakening or even reversing their initial mating preference in the presence of eavesdropping male sexual competitors. Our findings highlight the importance of social context and public information in male mate-choice decisions and have implications for the evolution of male mating preferences and of social information use in populations.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the Director of Fisheries, Ministry of Agriculture, Land and Marine Resources of Trinidad and Tobago for permission to collect fish from the Upper Aripo River; G.E. Brown and C. Elvidge for assistance with fish collection; I.W. Ramnarine for logistical support in Trinidad and C. Gabor, M. Plath and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on the manuscript. This research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada through a Discovery research grant awarded to J-GJG.

Compliance with ethical standards

The current study was approved by our Institutional Animal Care Committee (protocols 10651 and B10-17) and adheres to the animal use and care guidelines of the Canadian Council on Animal Care and thus the laws of Canada.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, K1S 5B6, Canada

    Heather L. Auld & Jean-Guy J. Godin

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  1. Heather L. Auld
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  2. Jean-Guy J. Godin
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Correspondence to Heather L. Auld.

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Communicated by C. R. Gabor

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Auld, H.L., Godin, JG.J. Sexual voyeurs and copiers: social copying and the audience effect on male mate choice in the guppy. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 69, 1795–1807 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-015-1992-z

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