Pre‐ and post‐copulatory sexual selection increase offspring quality but impose survival costs to female field crickets

Abstract

Sexual selection is an evolutionary process that arises from fitness differences associated with non-random success in the competition for access to gametes for fertilization (Andersson, 1994;Darwin, 1871;Shuker & Kvarnemo, 2021). It operates through mechanisms occurring before and/or after mating (hence, pre-and post-copulatory selection) (Birkhead & Pizzari, 2002;Evans & Garcia-Gonzalez, 2016).These include pre-copulatory male-male competition (i.e. males fighting for breeding territories or access to females; Andersson & Iwasa, 1996) and female choice (i.e. females selecting one or multiple partners) (Andersson & Simmons, 2006) as well as post-copulatory sperm competition (i.e. sperm of multiple males competing to fertilize the female's eggs) (Parker, 1970;Simmons, 2019) and cryptic female choice (i.e. females biasing fertilization towards a preferred male) (Eberhard, 1996;Pizzari & Birkhead, 2000). Whether sexual selection increases or decreases the fitness of individuals, ultimately affecting the mean fitness of the population, is still under