Skip Navigation


Behavioral Ecology Advance Access originally published online on December 15, 2005
Behavioral Ecology 2006 17(2):255-259; doi:10.1093/beheco/arj021
This Article
Right arrow Full Text Freely available
Right arrow FREE Full Text (PDF) Freely available
Right arrow Lay Summary
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
17/2/255    most recent
arj021v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in ISI Web of Science
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrow Search for citing articles in:
ISI Web of Science (7)
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Widemo, M. S.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow Articles by Widemo, M. S.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© 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.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 Proc R Soc BHome page
G. Freed-Brown and D. J. White
Acoustic mate copying: female cowbirds attend to other females' vocalizations to modify their song preferences
Proc R Soc B, September 22, 2009; 276(1671): 3319 - 3325.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Home page
 Behav EcolHome page
A. Vakirtzis and S. C. Roberts
Mate choice copying and mate quality bias: different processes, different species
Behav. Ecol., July 9, 2009; (2009) arp073v3.
[Full Text] [PDF]

Home page
 Behav EcolHome page
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]


Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.