Visual signals are crucial for animals to obtain information about their environment, and they play a significant role in mate choice. However, individual variability and factors such as movement patterns can hinder research flexibility. A key challenge in this field is the accurate simulation of specific movements and behaviors. In this study, we investigated the western mosquitofish () by creating 3D simulation animations using the Maya 2018 software. Meanwhile, we validated the effectiveness of this animation through dichotomous association preference tests. The results showed that our subjects could successfully identify 3D simulated mates, and both males and females demonstrated pronounced preferences for larger simulated animations. Moreover, our findings revealed that this species exhibited a notably stronger preference for 3D simulations compared to 2D animations. These findings suggest that 3D simulation technology holds significant potential for the investigation of fish mate choice, offering an efficient, precise, standardized, and easily manageable non-invasive method for future research in fish behavior.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ani14233369 | DOI Listing |
Ecol Evol
January 2025
Department of Biology, Barnard College Columbia University New York New York USA.
Males in many species show courtship and mating preferences for certain females over others when given the choice. One of the most common targets of male mate choice in insects is female body size, with males preferring to court and mate with larger, higher-fecundity females and investing more resources in matings with those females. Although this preference is well-documented at the species level, less is known about how this preference varies within species and whether there is standing genetic variation for male mate choice within populations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Rep
January 2025
Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, 248001, Uttarakhand, India.
Intra-specific interactions among top carnivores are among the most intriguing behavioural aspects and essential components of population dynamics. Static interactions pertain to space use, while dynamic interactions involve spatio-temporal patterns influenced by social structure, distribution, mate selection, and density. Previous studies have focused on static interactions, successfully estimating spatial overlap but leading to a knowledge gap of dynamic interaction to be able to compute attraction and avoidance on similar spatio-temporal scales.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Rep
January 2025
Centre for Ecology and Conservation, Faculty of Environment, Science & Economy, University of Exeter, Penryn Campus, Cornwall, TR10 9FE, UK.
Promiscuous females reduce male reproductive control. Males can attempt to monopolise access to these females, but distractions and sneaky rivals mean extra copulations cannot always be blocked. By mating first, males can obtain a headstart in sperm competition, but this may be negated by sperm storage and cryptic female choice mechanisms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Evol Biol
December 2024
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Reading, UK.
The time needed for the evolution of mating cues that distinguish species, such as species-specific songs or plumage coloration in birds, has received little attention. Aiming to gain some understanding of the timing of the evolutionary process we here present models of how mating cues evolve in populations split into subpopulations between which there may (parapatry) or may not (allopatry) be migration. Mating cues can be either neutral or directly selected.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNaturwissenschaften
January 2025
Institute for Animal Cell and Systems Biology, University of Hamburg, Martin-Luther-King Platz 3, Hamburg, 20146, Germany.
Physiological or genetic assays and computational modeling are valuable tools for understanding animals' visual discrimination capabilities. Yet sometimes, the results generated by these methods appear not to jive with other aspects of an animal's appearance or natural history, and behavioral confirmatory tests are warranted. Here we examine the peculiar case of a male jumping spider that displays red, black, white, and UV color patches during courtship despite the fact that, according to microspectrophotometry and color vision modeling, they are unlikely able to discriminate red from black.
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