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Behavioral Ecology Advance Access originally published online on December 15, 2005
Behavioral Ecology 2006 17(2):255-259; doi:10.1093/beheco/arj021
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Male but not female pipefish copy mate choice

Maria Sandvik Widemo

Department of Population Biology, Evolutionary Biology Centre, Uppsala University, Norbyvägen 18 D, SE-752 36 Uppsala, Sweden

Address correspondence to M.S. Widemo. E-mail: maria.widemo{at}ebc.uu.se.

If mate choice is costly, an individual may reduce the costs of choice by observing and copying the mate choice of others. Although copying has received much attention during the past 10 years, evidence of copying is not very strong, partly because of problems with distinguishing copying from other mechanisms creating similar mating patterns. I conducted an aquarium experiment using the deep-snouted pipefish Syngnathus typhle, a species with reversed sex roles and mutual mate choice. I tested whether copying occurred both during male and female mate choice. The results showed that males, but not females, displayed more toward an individual, which they perceived as popular among others, and this was interpreted as male mate choice copying. While being the first evidence of copying in a sex-role–reversed species, the sex difference in behavior mirrors the sex-role pattern and begs the question whether we should predict copying only in females in other species with mutual choice but conventional sex roles.

Key words: copying, cultural evolution, mutual mate choice, pipefish, sex-role reversal, Syngnathus typhle.


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D. Goulet and T. L. Goulet
Nonindependent mating in a coral reef damselfish: evidence of mate choice copying in the wild
Behav. Ecol., November 1, 2006; 17(6): 998 - 1003.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


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