Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 76, Issue 3, September 2008, Pages 971-982
Animal Behaviour

Female canary mate preferences: differential use of information from two types of male–male interaction

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2008.03.023Get rights and content

During mate choice, females can assess male quality by sampling one male after the other or by paying attention to the outcomes of male–male interactions. The latter strategy, called eavesdropping, allows females access to information about males' relative quality and therefore reduces the time, energy and other costs associated with searching for a mate. For oscine females, information can be gathered both by listening to male–male singing interactions and by visually observing male–male interactions. To date, however, there has been no comparison of the subsequent behaviour of females according to the specific type of information (acoustic or visual) gathered from male–male interactions. In two successive experiments, we explored how female domestic canaries, Serinus canaria, use visual and acoustic information obtained from a male–male interaction to direct their sexual behaviour. We found that, whereas females preferred the overlapping song of a singing interaction, they avoided the winner of a physical contest over food. The function and range of signals used in these two types of male–male competition may account for this discrepancy. Timing of song during countersinging is the expression of ritualized dominance relationships using a long-range secondary sexual trait, whereas threat displays used in food competition are not secondary sexual traits and are potentially harmful at close proximity. The timing of song during countersinging seems to be a more important cue for females than dominance over food in determining their sexual behaviour.

Section snippets

General method

We used 48 females and 24 males for these two experiments: 24 females for the first and 24 different females and 24 males for the second. Each experiment had two stages: during the initial stage, we allowed females either to hear (or not) or to monitor visually (or not) a male–male interaction (an acoustic interaction in experiment 1 and a physical interaction in experiment 2). In the second stage, we measured female preferences towards the male songs (experiment 1) or the males observed during

Experiment 1: females hear acoustic male–male interactions

We designed our experiment to evaluate female canaries' preferences towards male songs previously heard in simulated interactions, across their reproductive cycle. Testing started after the period of exposure to the interactions (two times a day for 5 days) and ended the day the female laid its last egg. We measured preferences by the number of CSDs subsequently elicited by an individual male song.

Females of the experimental group heard a simulated singing interaction during which one song

Experiment 2: females observe male–male visual interactions

We observed female canary preferences towards males that they had previously observed in a dyadic competition for extra food. In each competition there was a winner and a loser. We allowed females of the experimental group to monitor a competition for extra food between two males for 15 min, and consequently, they could obtain information about the hierarchical relationship between the two males. We then placed the females in a choice apparatus with both males.

Females of the control group did

General discussion

In two experiments we investigated how female domestic canaries use the information gathered during male–male interactions to direct their sexual preferences, either by listening or visually attending to a male–male interaction. When females heard male–male singing interactions, they showed a preference towards the overlapping (winning) song rather than towards the overlapped (losing) song, with a variation of preferences across their cycle. This variation of female preferences is adaptive as

Acknowledgments

M.A. is supported by the French Ministry of National Education. We especially thank F. Rochette and P. Lenouvel for their help with measuring male characteristics, S.-J. Vick for her help with improving the English of the manuscript and Ben Hatchwell and three anonymous referees for their very helpful comments on the manuscript.

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    D. Gomez and M. Théry are at the Département d'Ecologie et Gestion de la Biodiversité, CNRS UMR 7179, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, 4 avenue du Petit Château, 91800 Brunoy, France.

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