Female fur seals show active choice for males that are heterozygous and unrelated

Much debate surrounds the exact rules that influence mating behaviour, and in particular the selective forces that explain the evolution of female preferences. A key example is the lek paradox, in which female choice is expected rapidly to become ineffective owing to loss of additive genetic variabi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature 2007-02, Vol.445 (7130), p.912-914
Main Authors: Hoffman, J. I, Forcada, J, Trathan, P. N, Amos, W
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal behavior
Animal ethology
Animal reproduction
Animals
Aquatic mammals
Biological and medical sciences
Evolution
Fathers
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Fur Seals - genetics
Fur Seals - physiology
Genetic diversity
Genotype
Heredity
Heterozygote
Humanities and Social Sciences
Inbreeding
letter
Male
Mammalia
Marine
Mating Preference, Animal - physiology
Microsatellite Repeats - genetics
multidisciplinary
Phocidae
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Seals
Vertebrata
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Summary:Much debate surrounds the exact rules that influence mating behaviour, and in particular the selective forces that explain the evolution of female preferences. A key example is the lek paradox, in which female choice is expected rapidly to become ineffective owing to loss of additive genetic variability for the preferred traits. Here we exploit a remarkable system in which female fur seals exert choice by moving across a crowded breeding colony to visit largely static males. We show that females move further to maximize the balance between male high multilocus heterozygosity and low relatedness. Such a system shows that female choice can be important even in a strongly polygynous species, and at the same time may help to resolve the lek paradox because heterozygosity has low heritability and inbreeding avoidance means there is no single 'best' male for all females.
ISSN:0028-0836
1476-4687
1476-4679
DOI:10.1038/nature05558