ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2013
Sexual networks: measuring sexual selection in structured, polyandrous populations.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- A male-biased sex ratio increases the opportunity for precopulatory sexual selection but does not change the Bateman gradient.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- Animal social networks are robust to changing association definitions.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2025Article
- Collective signalling is shaped by feedbacks between signaller variation, receiver perception and acoustic environment in a simulated communication network.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- The impact of small groups on pre- and postcopulatory sexual selection in polyandrous populations.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Metapopulation structure modulates sexual antagonism.Evolution letters · 2021Article
- Phenology-mediated effects of phenotype on the probability of social polygyny and its fitness consequences in a migratory passerine.BMC ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Article
- Winter associations predict social and extra-pair mating patterns in a wild songbird.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Differential female sociality is linked with the fine-scale structure of sexual interactions in replicate groups of red junglefowl,Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Refuge size variation and potential for sperm competition in Wellington tree weta.Current zoology · 2019Article
- Sex peptide receptor-regulated polyandry modulates the balance of pre- and post-copulatory sexual selection in Drosophila.Nature communications · 2019Article
- Endless forms of sexual selection.PeerJ · 2019Article
- Structure of sexual networks determines the operation of sexual selection.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- The contrasting role of male relatedness in different mechanisms of sexual selection in red junglefowl.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2017Article
- Wild cricket social networks show stability across generations.BMC evolutionary biology · 2016Article
- Constructing, conducting and interpreting animal social network analysis.The Journal of animal ecology · 2015Article
- Interspecific social networks promote information transmission in wild songbirds.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2015Article
- The polyandry revolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2013Article
- Social network position predicts male mating success in a small passerine.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
- Comparing pre- and post-copulatory mate competition using social network analysis in wild crickets.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Sexual selection is traditionally measured at the population level, assuming that populations lack structure. However, increasing evidence undermines this approach, indicating that intrasexual competition in natural populations often displays complex patterns of spatial and temporal structure. This complexity is due in part to the degree and mechanisms of polyandry within a population, which can influence the intensity and scale of both pre- and post-copulatory sexual competition. Attempts to measure selection at the local and global scale have been made through multi-level selection approaches. However, definitions of local scale are often based on physical proximity, providing a rather coarse measure of local competition, particularly in polyandrous populations where the local scale of pre- and post-copulatory competition may differ drastically from each other. These limitations can be solved by social network analysis, which allows us to define a unique sexual environment for each member of a population: 'local scale' competition, therefore, becomes an emergent property of a sexual network. Here, we first propose a novel quantitative approach to measure pre- and post-copulatory sexual selection, which integrates multi-level selection with information on local scale competition derived as an emergent property of networks of sexual interactions. We then use simple simulations to illustrate the ways in which polyandry can impact estimates of sexual selection. We show that for intermediate levels of polyandry, the proposed network-based approach provides substantially more accurate measures of sexual selection than the more traditional population-level approach. We argue that the increasing availability of fine-grained behavioural datasets provides exciting new opportunities to develop network approaches to study sexual selection in complex societies.
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