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Behavioral Ecology Advance Access published online on April 27, 2005
Behavioral Ecology, doi:10.1093/beheco/ari050
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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@oupjournals.org
Received February 7, 2004
Revised November 11, 2004
Accepted March 11, 2005

Article

Mate guarding, male attractiveness, and paternity under social monogamy

Hanna Kokko 1* and Lesley J. Morrell 2

1 Department of Biological and Environmental Science, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 65 (Viikinkaari 1), FIN-00014 Helsinki, Finland; School of Botany and Zoology, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia
2 Division of Environmental and Evolutionary Biology, Institute of Biomedical and Life Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Hanna Kokko, E-mail: hanna.kokko{at}helsinki.fi


  Abstract

Socially monogamous species vary widely in the frequency of extrapair offspring, but this is usually discussed assuming that females are free to express mate choice. Using game-theory modeling, we investigate the evolution of male mate guarding, and the relationship between paternity and mate-guarding intensity. We show that the relationship between evolutionarily stable mate-guarding behavior and the risk of cuckoldry can be complicated and nonlinear. Because male fitness accumulates both through paternity at his own nest and through his paternity elsewhere, males evolve to guard little either if females are very faithful or if they are very unfaithful. Attractive males are usually expected to guard less than unattractive males, but within-pair paternity may correlate either positively or negatively with the number of extrapair offspring fertilized by a male. Negative correlations, whereby attractive males are cuckolded more, become more likely if the reason behind female extrapair behavior applies to most females (e.g., fertility insurance) rather than the subset mated to unattractive males (e.g., when females seek "good genes") and if mate guarding is efficient in controlling female behavior. We discuss the current state of empirical knowledge with respect to these findings.

Keywords: extrapair paternity; mate guarding; self-consistent model; sexual conflict.
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