Symposium number: 05

Title: FLEXIBILITY IN MATING SIGNALS AND MATE CHOICE: ULTIMATE AND PROXIMATE BASES

Principal organizer: Keith Sockman
University of North Carolina, Department of Biology, Chapel Hill, NC 27599 3280, USA
email: kws@unc.edu

Second organizer: Elizabeth MacDougall Shackleton
University of Western Ontario, Department of Biology, London, Ontario N6A 5B7, Canada

First keynote speaker: Elizabeth MacDougall Shackleton
University of Western Ontario, Department of Biology, London, Ontario N6A 5B7, Canada
Title of first keynote paper: Environmental quality, physiological stress and female mating strategies in Song Sparrows

Second keynote speaker: Keith Sockman
University of North Carolina, Department of Biology, Chapel Hill, NC 27599 3280, USA
Title of second keynote paper: Neural orchestration of mate-choice plasticity

Contributed talks

Symposium description: Sexual selection theory has traditionally assumed that mating signals and preferences are fixed, with only minimal input from factors such as experience, condition, or the environment. This perspective predicts strong directional selection for trait expression and is therefore difficult to reconcile with observations of individual flexibility in expression of sexually selected courtship traits and mating preferences. Despite several studies pertaining to the variable nature of courtship and mate choice, many questions remain concerning how variation in these behaviours arises and what the fitness consequences of such variation might be. For example, why do males vary so much in their ability to produce successful courtship signals? What are the fitness consequences of females preferring one courtship strategy over another, and under what environmental conditions do these consequences change? What neural substrates in the female are sensitive to variation in male courtship signals? How does this sensitivity arise? How is it modulated by the environment, and how does it eventually lead to the motor programs that precipitate a context dependent choice? This symposium integrates ultimate and proximate perspectives on individual flexibility in avian courtship and mating preferences, with the goal of determining how and why such flexibility may have evolved.

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