Familiarity breeds contempt in guppies

Kelley, Jennifer L.; Graves, Jeff A.; Magurran, Anne E.

doi:10.1038/44314

Cited by 150 publications

(110 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Since familiarity-biased association patterns are widely documented among many animals, ranging from mammals to fishes (e.g. Magurran et al 1994;Porter et al 2001), and are also important in mate-choice decisions (Kelley et al 1999;Hughes et al 1999), the results of this study suggest that the ability to recognize particular (familiar) conspecifics may be important in overcoming the limitations of cognitive attention in many contexts.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Coping with divided attention: the advantage of familiarity

Griffiths

Brockmark

Höjesjö

et al. 2004

Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B

142

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The ability of an animal to perform a task successfully is limited by the amount of attention being simultaneously focused on other activities. One way in which individuals might reduce the cost of divided attention is by preferentially focusing on the most beneficial tasks. In territorial animals where aggression is lower among familiar individuals, the decision to associate preferentially with familiar conspecifics may therefore confer advantages by allowing attention to be switched from aggression to predator vigilance and feeding. Wild juvenile brown trout were used to test the prediction that familiar fishes respond more quickly than unfamiliar fishes to a simulated predator attack. Our results confirm this prediction by demonstrating that familiar trout respond 14% faster than unfamiliar individuals to a predator attack. The results also show that familiar fishes consume a greater number of food items, foraging at more than twice the rate of unfamiliar conspecifics. To the best of our knowledge, these results provide the first evidence that familiarity-biased association confers advantages through the immediate fitness benefits afforded by faster predator-evasion responses and the long-term benefits provided by increased feeding opportunities.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Coping with divided attention: the advantage of familiarity

Griffiths

Brockmark

Höjesjö

et al. 2004

Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B

142

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show abstract

“…Fish density was kept constant, and the design was replicated five times using different focal guppies. We used 15 pairs of S. bilineata females (one pair per trial to avoid possible familiarity; Kelley et al 1999), and kept them in different home tanks before trials. Thus, neither focal males nor pairs of S. bilineata females were reused.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Heterospecific harassment of native endangered fishes by invasive guppies in Mexico

2008

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Persistent courtship by male Trinidadian guppies ( Poecilia reticulata ) is costly for conspecific females. Since male guppies are known to attempt matings with other poeciliid females, we asked whether persistent courtship is also directed towards morphologically similar but phylogenetically distant females encountered following invasion. Skiffia bilineata is one of several endangered viviparous goodeids from Central México, whose remaining habitats are increasingly shared with invasive guppies. Experiments in which guppy sex ratios were manipulated to vary the proportion of heterospecific to conspecific females showed that male guppies courted and attempted forced copulations with S. bilineata females even when females of their own species were in excess. This behaviour places an additional, and previously unrecognized, burden on a group of endemic Mexican fishes already in risk of extinction.

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“…Since pursuing and courting females may result in significant energetic costs [23,24], and males cannot simultaneously court two different females, it can be expected that male guppies exhibit some degree of choosiness. Indeed, males have been shown to prefer receptive [4], larger [25] and unfamiliar females [26] as mates.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do unattractive friends make you look better? Context-dependent male mating preferences in the guppy

2013

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Recent theory predicts that in species where females tend to mate with the relatively most ornamented males, males may increase their attractiveness to females, and hence mating success, by preferentially associating with females that are surrounded by less ornamented competitors. Despite this prediction, we still lack explicit experimental evidence that males strategically prefer females surrounded by less attractive competitors to maximize their relative attractiveness. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive test of this hypothesis in the guppy (Poecilia reticulata), a species where a female's perception of a male's attractiveness depends on his coloration relative to that of surrounding males. We found that males preferentially associated with females that were surrounded by relatively drab competitors, and that the strength of an individual male's preference was negatively correlated with his level of ornamentation. A series of control experiments made it possible to exclude the potentially confounding effects of male-male competition or social motivations when drawing these conclusions. The ability of males to choose social context to increase their relative attractiveness has important evolutionary consequences, for example, by contributing towards the maintenance of variability in male sexual ornamentation despite the strong directional selection exerted by female preferences.

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Familiarity breeds contempt in guppies

Cited by 150 publications

References 10 publications

Coping with divided attention: the advantage of familiarity

Coping with divided attention: the advantage of familiarity

Heterospecific harassment of native endangered fishes by invasive guppies in Mexico

Do unattractive friends make you look better? Context-dependent male mating preferences in the guppy

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