Mating patterns of female Leon Springs pupfish Cyprinodon bovinus.

In a field study of Leon Springs pupfish Cyprinodon bovinus, two questions about female promiscuity were investigated. First, were females selective in the males with whom they spawned or were they unselective, spawning randomly among males? Second, how promiscuous were the females, i.e. with how many males did they spawn? If simply spawning with many males maximized a female's reproductive success, then females might be expected to spawn randomly with as many males as possible. Alternatively, if females were selective but engaged in multiple mating, they would limit their spawning to preferred males. In the only wild population of this endangered fish, breeding males defend closely associated territories in the shallow margins of a single desert pool. No territories were observed elsewhere in the pool. Therefore, all territorial males were present simultaneously and females could survey all of them, depositing any number of eggs with one, a few or many males. Rather than spawning randomly, females surveyed many males first, visited relatively few males and ultimately spawned with a small fraction of those available males. With increasing numbers of spawns, however, females increased the number of different mates with whom they spawned. Thus, females showed a bet-hedging tactic of having a narrow mate preference while also laying eggs in the territories of other males, possibly to reduce egg predation and to avoid inbreeding.