Evolution and function of multimodal courtship displays

Abstract

Courtship displays are behaviours aimed to facilitate attraction and mating with the opposite sex and are very common across the animal kingdom. Most courtship displays are multimodal, meaning that they are composed of concomitant signals occurring in different sensory modalities. Although courtship often strongly influences reproductive success, the question of why and how males use multimodal courtship to increase their fitness has not yet received much attention. Very little is known about the role of different components of male courtship and their relative importance for females. Indeed, most of the work on courtship displays have focused on effects on female choice, often neglecting other possible roles. Additionally, a number of scientists have recently stressed the importance of considering the complexity of a display and the interactions between its different components in order to grasp all the information contained in those multimodal signals. Unfortunately, these methods have not yet been extensively adapted in courtship studies. The aim of this study was to review what is currently known about the functional significance of courtship displays, particularly about the role of multimodality in the courtship communication context. Emphasis is placed on those cases where a complete picture of the communication system can only be assessed by taking complexity and interaction between different modalities into account.

Designing mate choice experiments

“…Given that multimodal signals represent a more ecologically realistic scenario, this latter finding raises the possibility that laboratory experiments consistently overestimate the strength of sexual selection on any given display component when it is tested in isolation, compared to the natural, multimodal situation. However, despite the ubiquity of multimodal signalling, relatively few studies to date have tested for these effects (Mitoyen et al ., ).…”

“…Mate choice experiments typically test for mating preferences for a single trait at a time. However, sexual signalling may often be multimodal (Candolin, ; Mitoyen, Quigley & Fusani, ). Studies comparing choice behaviour between subjects presented with unimodal or multimodal displays have shown that the presentation of multimodal signals may increase the overall response rate (Uetz, Roberts & Taylor, ; Bailey, ; Reichert & Höbel, ), improve choice accuracy when options are similar (Gomez et al ., ), and lead to weaker mating preferences for any single component (Reichert & Höbel, ).…”

Assessment of fighting ability in the vocal cichlid Metriaclima zebra in face of incongruent audiovisual information

“…Although multimodal communication and perception has received increasing attention in recent years (Narins et al, 2003;Skals et al, 2005;Koppen and Spence, 2007;Diaconescu et al, 2011;Pluta et al, 2011;Taylor et al, 2011;Fetsch et al, 2013;Ben-Ari and Inbar, 2014;Cecere et al, 2015;Kayser and Shams, 2015;Parise and Ernst, 2016;Schumacher et al, 2016Schumacher et al, , 2017Halfwerk et al, 2019;McIntyre and Preuss, 2019;Mitoyen et al, 2019), multisensory perception should not only be interpreted in relation to information uncertainty but also in an adaptive framework, i.e. Fig.…”

The functions of multiple visual signals in a fiddler crab

“…It is also possible that by displaying double and single waves at high rates, focal males decrease the chances that the receiver will habituate (Partan & Marler, ). We know that each signal type is individually attractive (Perez & Backwell, ), and they must interact and have a joint role in communicating to conspecifics (Mitoyen et al, ). Future preference experiments that manipulate the proportion of signal types displayed will be essential to test this hypothesis.…”