Benefits of Female Promiscuity
Female promiscuity is widespread, does it bring fitness advantages? Miguel, in collaboration with Anne, Maria, Sean Connolly and Mizue Hissano, addressed this question in a recent paper, which is already a highly accessed paper, as well as an Editor’s pick.
Using the Trinidadian guppy as model, Miguel set out to examine the fitness consequences of female multiple mating, by tracking the fate and quality of offspring from contrasting mating treatments across two generations. By using this sampling design, we were able to partition the fitness benefits into direct (i.e. in the first generation) and indirect (i.e. second generation).
The results showed that female promiscuity in guppies is advantageous. Females that mated multiply achieved ~1.5 fold increase in fecundity, at no greater reproductive costs. Our results also showed multiple mating does not increase offspring viability, as when the number of F1 produced was taken into account, there were no differences in the number of grand-offspring produced via single or multiple mating.
Sexual conflict arises when males and females reproductive success is achieved through different mating rates. However our results show that female fitness can be maximized by mating multiply. This result together with previous evidence that females promote multiple mating shifts the traditional view of sexual conflict. It is then time to examine mating decisions from the perspective that both female and male fitness can be mazimized by mating multiply.
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