Researchers are trying to find out why females choose attractive men even though the former may incur more survival costs than males in rearing offspring, especially when they choose flashy mates.
Megan Head and colleagues now report in the online journal PLoS Biology, the results of simultaneously measuring both the costs and benefits of mating to female crickets and their offspring and provide new evidence that the costs that females pay for mating with attractive males are balanced by the fact that they produce offsprings with a higher level of fitness.
The authors paired females with either "attractive" or "unattractive" males (determining which males were attractive by running the equivalent of speed dating "tournaments") and measured the overall fitness consequences of the various unions.
Although female crickets, they found, paid a higher survival price for mating with attractive males, these females produced both daughters that laid more eggs within a given time and sons that were more attractive.
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