Female Choice or Male Sex Drive? The Advantages of Male Body Size during Mating in Drosophila Melanogaster.

ABSTRACT: The mating success of larger male Drosophila melanogaster in the laboratory and the wild has been traditionally been explained by female choice, even though the reasons are generally hard to reconcile. Female choice can explain this success by virtue of females taking less time to mate with preferred males, but so can the more aggressive or persistent courtships efforts of large males. Since mating is a negotiation between the two sexes, the behaviors of both are likely to interact and influence mating outcomes. Using a series of assays, we explored these negotiations by testing for the relative influence of male behaviors and its effect on influencing female courtship arousal threshold, which is the time taken for females to accept copulation. Our results show that large males indeed have

SUBMITTER: Jagadeeshan S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4676700 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature