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Behavioral Ecology Advance Access originally published online on January 10, 2008
Behavioral Ecology 2008 19(2):374-381; doi:10.1093/beheco/arm140
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© The Author 2008. 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

Colorful male guppies do not provide females with fecundity benefits

Andrea Pilastroa, Clelia Gasparinia, Chiara Boschettoa and Jonathan P. Evansb

a Dipartimento di Biologia, Università di Padova, via Ugo Bassi 58/B, 35131 Padova, Italy b Centre for Evolutionary Biology, School of Animal Biology, University of Western Australia, Nedlands 6009 WA, Australia

Address correspondence to A. Pilastro. E-mail: andrea.pilastro{at}unipd.it.


  Abstract

The phenotype-linked fertility hypothesis (PLFH) predicts that males with elaborated sexual ornaments signal their high fertilizing efficiency to females and that female preferences for ornamented males are driven by direct fecundity benefits. Although some studies have demonstrated that attractive males produce more or higher quality sperm, there is limited experimental evidence that females derive fecundity benefits by mating with attractive males. Some of the best indirect evidence for the PLFH comes from work on guppies (Poecilia reticulata), an internally fertilizing species of freshwater fish in which phenotypically attractive males produce larger and relatively higher quality ejaculates than their less attractive counterparts. We used artificial insemination to impregnate female guppies using known numbers of sperm from a range of males with different phenotypes and related female fecundity (brood success, time from insemination to parturition, and brood size) to sperm numbers and male phenotype (body size and the relative area of color spots). We found no evidence that male phenotype or experimentally adjusted "ejaculate" size influenced any of our measures of female fecundity. These results highlight the importance of experimentally investigating potential fecundity benefits associated with female mating preferences before concluding that the maintenance of these preferences is driven by the pursuit of such benefits.

Key words: artificial insemination, direct benefits, fecundity, female choice, male sexual secondary characters, sperm number.

Received 13 February 2007; revised 15 November 2007; accepted 22 November 2007.


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