Mating portfolios: bet-hedging, sexual selection and female multiple mating.

ABSTRACT: Polyandry (female multiple mating) has profound evolutionary and ecological implications. Despite considerable work devoted to understanding why females mate multiply, we currently lack convincing empirical evidence to explain the adaptive value of polyandry. Here, we provide a direct test of the controversial idea that bet-hedging functions as a risk-spreading strategy that yields multi-generational fitness benefits to polyandrous females. Unfortunately, testing this hypothesis is far from trivial, and the empirical comparison of the across-generations fitness payoffs of a polyandrous (bet hedger) versus a monandrous (non-bet hedger) strategy has never been accomplished because of numerous experimental constraints presented by most 'model' species. In this study, we take advantage of the

SUBMITTER: Garcia-Gonzalez F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4262161 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature