Female mate choice is a major mechanism of sexual selection, influencing the evolution of behaviour, morphology and life-history. Despite being so important, much about female mate choice remains unclear. Crucially, we have a limited understanding of how mating decisions are affected by the social environment within which these decisions inevitably occur. Here, we review how the social environment influences female mate choice...

Most animal behaviors show large within- and among-individual variation, and this includes competitive male behaviors. With male fighting for example, aggressiveness often correlates with dominance, and contest duration varies with age. However, few studies have directly quantified how mean aggressiveness and contest duration, the variation among individuals in both traits, and the relationship among them, vary with age. Here...

Understanding how diet affects reproduction and survival is a central aim in evolutionary biology. Although this relationship is likely to differ between the sexes, we lack data relating diet to male reproductive traits. One exception to this general pattern is Drosophila melanogaster, where male dietary intake was quantified using the CA pillary FE eder (CAFE) method. However, CAFE feeding reduces D. melanogaster survival and...

Ecology Letters (2012) Abstract Males and females frequently have different fitness optima for shared traits, and as a result, genotypes that are high fitness as males are low fitness as females, and vice versa . When this occurs, biasing of offspring sex‐ratio to reduce the production of the lower‐fitness sex would be advantageous, so that for example, broods produced by high‐fitness females should contain fewer sons. We test...