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Negative effects of prolonged dietary restriction on male mating effort: nuptial gifts as honest indicators of long-term male condition
The handicap principle proposes that sexual signals must be costly to be honest. Honesty may be maintained by the costs paid by honest signallers or by the potential costs of cheating. In the latter, handicaps should emerge as a consequence of specific biological constraints, such as life-history tr...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group
2016
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4764815/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26908253 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep21846 |
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author | Macedo-Rego, Renato C. Costa-Schmidt, Luiz Ernesto Santos, Eduardo S. A. Machado, Glauco |
author_facet | Macedo-Rego, Renato C. Costa-Schmidt, Luiz Ernesto Santos, Eduardo S. A. Machado, Glauco |
author_sort | Macedo-Rego, Renato C. |
collection | PubMed |
description | The handicap principle proposes that sexual signals must be costly to be honest. Honesty may be maintained by the costs paid by honest signallers or by the potential costs of cheating. In the latter, handicaps should emerge as a consequence of specific biological constraints, such as life-history trade-offs. Nuptial prey-giving arthropods are good systems to investigate the honesty of sexual signals taking into account trade-offs between self-maintenance and mating effort. We experimentally evaluated if prolonged food shortage during early adulthood imposes long-term negative effects on gift construction by males of the spider Paratrechalea ornata. We also evaluated whether a burst of food availability improved body condition of poorly fed males, increasing their frequency of gift construction. Poorly fed males hardly constructed gifts, even after a marked increase in feeding rate, which clearly improved their body condition. Moreover, initially poorly fed males that latter received high food intake constructed lighter gifts than continuously well fed males. The long-term effects of prolonged dietary restriction on male propensity to construct a gift and on the size of this gift may increase the honesty of this sexually selected signal. From the female’s perspective the offer of a gift may bring information on male quality. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4764815 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2016 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-47648152016-03-02 Negative effects of prolonged dietary restriction on male mating effort: nuptial gifts as honest indicators of long-term male condition Macedo-Rego, Renato C. Costa-Schmidt, Luiz Ernesto Santos, Eduardo S. A. Machado, Glauco Sci Rep Article The handicap principle proposes that sexual signals must be costly to be honest. Honesty may be maintained by the costs paid by honest signallers or by the potential costs of cheating. In the latter, handicaps should emerge as a consequence of specific biological constraints, such as life-history trade-offs. Nuptial prey-giving arthropods are good systems to investigate the honesty of sexual signals taking into account trade-offs between self-maintenance and mating effort. We experimentally evaluated if prolonged food shortage during early adulthood imposes long-term negative effects on gift construction by males of the spider Paratrechalea ornata. We also evaluated whether a burst of food availability improved body condition of poorly fed males, increasing their frequency of gift construction. Poorly fed males hardly constructed gifts, even after a marked increase in feeding rate, which clearly improved their body condition. Moreover, initially poorly fed males that latter received high food intake constructed lighter gifts than continuously well fed males. The long-term effects of prolonged dietary restriction on male propensity to construct a gift and on the size of this gift may increase the honesty of this sexually selected signal. From the female’s perspective the offer of a gift may bring information on male quality. Nature Publishing Group 2016-02-24 /pmc/articles/PMC4764815/ /pubmed/26908253 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep21846 Text en Copyright © 2016, Macmillan Publishers Limited http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
spellingShingle | Article Macedo-Rego, Renato C. Costa-Schmidt, Luiz Ernesto Santos, Eduardo S. A. Machado, Glauco Negative effects of prolonged dietary restriction on male mating effort: nuptial gifts as honest indicators of long-term male condition |
title | Negative effects of prolonged dietary restriction on male mating effort: nuptial gifts as honest indicators of long-term male condition |
title_full | Negative effects of prolonged dietary restriction on male mating effort: nuptial gifts as honest indicators of long-term male condition |
title_fullStr | Negative effects of prolonged dietary restriction on male mating effort: nuptial gifts as honest indicators of long-term male condition |
title_full_unstemmed | Negative effects of prolonged dietary restriction on male mating effort: nuptial gifts as honest indicators of long-term male condition |
title_short | Negative effects of prolonged dietary restriction on male mating effort: nuptial gifts as honest indicators of long-term male condition |
title_sort | negative effects of prolonged dietary restriction on male mating effort: nuptial gifts as honest indicators of long-term male condition |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4764815/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26908253 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep21846 |
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