ArticleBMC evolutionary biology2017
Females of a gift-giving spider do not trade sex for food gifts: a consequence of male deception?
Article in BMC evolutionary biology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Mating competition among females: testing the distinction between natural and sexual selection in an insect.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Stressful environments favor deceptive alternative mating tactics to become dominant.BMC biology · 2023Article
- Article
- Differential allocation in a gift-giving spider: males adjust their reproductive investment in response to female condition.BMC ecology and evolution · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundPolyandry is commonly maintained by direct benefits in gift-giving species, so females may remate as an adaptive foraging strategy. However, the assumption of a direct benefit fades in mating systems where male gift-giving behaviour has evolved from offering nutritive to worthless (non-nutritive) items. In the spider Paratrechalea ornata, 70% of gifts in nature are worthless. We therefore predicted female receptivity to be independent of hunger in this species. We exposed poorly-fed and well-fed females to multiple males offering nutritive gifts and well-fed females to males offering worthless gifts.
resultsThough the treatments strongly affected fecundity, females of all groups had similar number of matings. This confirms that female receptivity is independent of their nutritional state, i.e. polyandry does not prevail as a foraging strategy.
conclusionsIn the spider Pisaura mirabilis, in which the majority (62%) of gifts in nature are nutritive, female receptivity depends on hunger. We therefore propose that the dependence of female receptivity on hunger state may have evolved in species with predominantly nutritive gifts but is absent in species with predominantly worthless gifts.
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