Question

Some fish are paternal mouth-brooders, meaning that a male protects his young by allowing them to shelter inside his mouth. This care starts at the fertilized egg stage, and in some species continues for a while even after the offspring become free-swimming. Males in these species either stop or severely reduce feeding during the mouth-brooding period, and typically lose weight. Often, females can produce more eggs than a single male can successfully brood (meaning that a female could potentially have multiple broods in a given season - if she mates with multiple males – but a male can only raise a single brood). Given these patterns, do you predict females or males will be the choosier sex with respect to choosing mates? If one of the sexes were to possess brighter colors or more elaborate ornamentation, which would you predict it would be? Explain your reasoning with reference to sexual selection theory.

Answer 1

Answer- Sexual selection is a type of natural selection process in which one sex prefers a specific characteristic in an individual of the other sex.

In the given pattern, female is choosier sex.

According to sexual selection theory- During sexual selection, one sex behaves as choosier sex while another competes with other individuals of same sex for getting chances of mating. Therefore the individual which have more ornamentations will be competing one, while it's opposite sex will be choosier.