page_title: Mate choice copying
section_title: Olfactory copying
hierarchical_section_title: Mate choice copying / Mechanism / Olfactory copying
caption_attribution_description: English: Brown rat near the River Kennet, Marlborough Rattus norvegicus is notoriously fecund and a female rat reproduces 6 to 8 times a year with an average of 7 babies each time. She can mate 18 hours after giving birth. More here http://www.ebi.ac.uk/2can/genomes/eukaryotes/Rattus_norvegicus.html
context_page_description: Mate-choice copying, or non-independent mate choice, is simply when a female of an animal species copies another fellow female's mate-choice. In other words, non-independent mate-choice is when a female's sexual preferences get socially inclined toward those of its fellow female. This behavior is speculated to be one of the driving forces of sexual selection and the evolution of male traits. It is also hypothesized that mate-choice copying can induce speciation due to the selective pressure for certain, preferred male qualities. Moreover, mate-choice copying is one form of social learning in which animals behave differently depending on what they observe in their surrounding environment. In other words, the animals tend to process the social stimuli they receive by observing the behavior of their conspecifics and execute a similar behavior to what they observed. Mate choice copying has been found in a wide variety of different species, including: invertebrates, like the common fruit fly; fish, such as guppies and ocellated wrasse; birds, like the black grouse; and mammals, such as the Norway rat and humans.
context_section_description: In some cases, a direct, visual observation of the sexual interaction between the demonstrator and the target is not necessary; female rodents, for instance, use olfactory stimuli as a reference to whether the target male has been chosen by other females or not. A female rodent may choose to mate with a target male if there is a smell of other females associated with this male’s urine, as an indication that it has been mated with by other fellow females.
caption: Naive, female Norway rats employ olfactory cueing to copy the mate choice of experienced females.
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