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Behavioral Ecology Vol. 13 No. 4: 580-581
© 2002 International Society for Behavioral Ecology
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On hotshots and lotteries: are the best males on larger leks better than expected?
Department of Biology, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI 48197, USA
Address correspondence to P.A. Bednekoff. E-mail: peter.bednekoff@emich.edu .
Received 9 May 2001; revised 15 November 2001; accepted 18 December 2001.
| The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below. |
Leks are clusters of males that hold territories containing no special
resources except for the males themselves
(Höglund and Alatalo,
1995
). Among hypotheses put forth to explain why such clusters
form, the hotshot hypothesis posits that leks form by males that would
otherwise receive little attention from females taking up positions next to
males that would receive a great deal of female attention in any case
(Beehler and Foster, 1988;
Höglund and Alatalo,
1995). Although this idea might well be true, we still face the
task of evaluating the evidence. In this note I question the efficacy of
testing for hotshots by observing the success of males at leks of different
sizes.
Several authors have noted that the males most successful in attracting
mates on larger leks are more successful than the best males on smaller leks
(Westcott and Smith, 1997
Method 1: working with ranks
Method 2: weighting by likelihood of being the hotshot
A worked example
DISCUSSION
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