page_title: Mate choice copying
section_title: Benefits
hierarchical_section_title: Mate choice copying / Evolutionary origin / Benefits
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: Mate-choice copying has evolved to eliminate the possible costs—including time and energy —of mate-choice. The fact that mate-choice copying exists in various species is due to the differential abilities of females in choosing a desirable male with good quality genes. In other words, not all females have the same capability of taking good decisions when it comes to mate-choice. Therefore, mate-choice copying as a behavior has evolved through social learning to educate those females—including naive ones—to choose a desirable male, allowing only good quality genes to be propagated in the population over time  . For instance, naïve female mice that had just entered the estrus cycle for their first time might choose a male if its urine is associated with the smell of other, older females in the estrus cycle. Therefore, mate-choice copying reduces the error frequency in mate-choice among inexperienced females, guaranteeing an increased relative fitness for the copying females. Another example can be seen in black grouse, Tetrao tetrix, where the naive females in their first breeding season tend to mate later than experienced females so that the former can copy the choice of the latter.
  Mate-choice copying also becomes effective when the females are constrained by time (i.e. if the breeding season is soon to end) in which case females tend to copy each other's choice to avoid going through the time-consuming choice process that might cost them not being able to mate at all. Mate-choice copying is also effective at eliminating the stress in females of monogamous species such as Gouldian finches (Erythrura gouldiae) that would have otherwise had to mate with a less-desirable, poor-quality male. Another hypothesis that have been also proposed is that Game theory applies to the mate-choice copying behavior where females choose whether to be an observer or a demonstrator based on the abundance of each in the population. A female might tend to become an observer in a population where demonstrators are more abundant to increase its chances of having access to a high-quality male and vice versa. 
  Despite the fact that mate-choice copying, in theory, reduces the relative fitness of those males that are not chosen, it reduces their risks of injury and possible death of the aggressive courtship behaviors that they would have otherwise participated in with the chosen, high-quality males. Some evidence have shown that in species where females display cryptic mate choice, males tend to display the reverse of mate choice copying to avoid mating with females that have been visually observed mating with higher-quality, rival males. Such a mate choice behavior is displayed by a male mainly to avoid wasting its energy in having a sexual interaction that might not necessarily increase its relative fitness if the female chose the sperms of the rival to fertilize its eggs. There are also some instances where the males of a certain species get to be the choosier sex due to their higher parental investment in the offspring than females; an example where males practice mate-choice copying would be sailfin mollies (Poecilia latipinna).
caption: In some instances as in sailfin molly, it is the males of a species that display mate-choice copying.
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