Courtship display

A courtship display is a set of display behaviors in which an animal attempts to attract a mate and exhibit their desire to copulate. These behaviors often include ritualized movement ("dances"), vocalizations, mechanical sound production, or displays of beauty, strength, or agonistic ability.

In most species, the male is the sex that initiates courtship displays in pre-copulatory sexual selection. Performing a display allows the male to present his traits or abilities to a female. Mate choice, in this context, is driven by females. Direct or indirect benefits are often key deciding factors in which males get to copulate and which don't.

Direct benefits can be seen due to the expression of preference. Females can raise their own fitness if they prefer to respond to particular types of signals, independent of costs and certain benefits associated with mating. For example, choosing to mate with males that produce more localized signals would incur less of an energetic investment for a female as she searches for a mate. On the other hand, females can put in more energy towards this process and still attain a higher fitness if they mate with only particular types of males. With this, the males being chosen may impose lower costs on the female or even provide more in terms of material or offspring contributions.

Indirect benefits are benefits that may not directly affect the parents' fitness but instead increase the fitness of the offspring. Since the offspring of a female will inherit half of the genetic information from the male counterpart, those traits she saw as attractive will be passed on, producing an offspring that is potentially more fit.

The male Six-Plumed bird-of-paradise, Parotia lawesii, exemplifies this idea of male courtship display with its ritualized "ballerina dance" and unique occipital and breast feathers that serve to stimulate the female visual system. This stimulation, along with many other factors, results in subsequent copulation or rejection.

In some species, males initiate courtship rituals only after mounting the female. Courtship may even continue after copulation has been completed. In this systems, the ability of the female to choose their mates is limited. This process, known as copulatory courtship, is prevalent in many insect species.

Female courtship display is less common in nature as a female would have to invest a lot of energy into both exaggerated traits and in their energetically expensive gametes. However, situations in which males are the sexually selective sex in a species do occur in nature. Male choice in reproduction can arise if males are the sex in a species that are in short supply, for example, if there is a female bias in the operational sex ratio. This could arise in mating systems where reproducing comes at an energy cost to males. Such energy costs can include the effort associated in obtaining nuptial gifts for the female or performing long courtship or copulatory behaviors. An added cost from these time and energy investment may come in the form of increased male mortality rates, putting further strain on males attempting to reproduce.

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