Incidental Sanctions and the Evolution of Direct Benefits

Abstract

Recent research has shown that a variety of traits that increase male success in mating and sperm competition can impose costs on females, resulting in antagonistic coevolution between the sexes.

Costly Signals in a Field Cricket Can Indicate High- Or Low-Quality Direct Benefits Depending Upon the Environment

“…This result is consistent, however, with some work on other orthopterans (e.g., Simmons et al 1992). Males might continue to provide high‐quality benefits in low nutrition environments, despite the greater fitness cost, because female mating behavior penalizes low benefit males (Wagner and Basolo 2008), and penalizes low benefit males more in low nutrition environments. In G. lineaticeps , for example, females will mate one to six times with a male within a night (Wagner et al 2001b), and females are more likely to repeatedly mate with males that provide high‐quality direct benefits (Wagner et al 2007).…”

“…As discussed above, differential repeated mating with high benefit males should favor male‐provided direct benefits. It should also penalize males that produce attractive signals but provide low‐quality benefits; these males will pay the cost of producing the signal but will receive a low payoff from their investment (Wagner and Basolo 2008).…”

“…Although differential costs of signaling are sufficient for reliable signaling of male genetic quality, they are insufficient for reliable signaling of direct benefit quality. The reason for this is that males that can afford the costs of producing attractive signals may choose to cheat on the benefit, and differential costs of signaling do nothing to prevent such cheating (Bussière 2002; Bussière et al 2005; Wagner and Basolo 2008). Nonetheless, differential costs may contribute to reliable signaling of direct benefit quality by constraining the production of deceptive signals by low benefit males.…”