REPEATABILITY OF FEMALE CHOICE IN THE GUPPY - RESPONSE TO LIVE AND VIDEOTAPED MALES

The degree to which females are consistent in their mate preferences h as implications for studies of sexual selection. Because choice of fem ales for particular males may be affected by temporal changes in male characteristics, consistency of mate preferences of individual females of Poecilia rericulata was studied by presenting them with the same m ale pairs in consecutive trials under three experimental procedures: l ive males behind clear glass, live males behind one-way glass and imag es of males on videotape. Although females did not habituate to males in any of the experiments, they spent significantly more time in proxi mity to males behind clear glass than in the video and one-way glass p resentations. Females preferred the bright male over the pale one in t he video and the clear glass presentations, but not in the one-way gla ss experiment. Repeatability of preferences by individual females for a male was high in the video and one-way glass presentations but low i n the clear-glass experiment. Behavioural interactions with the male i n the clear-glass experiment affected both the time that females spent viewing males as well as female visual preferences. Results indicate that the video playback is not only useful for detecting differences b etween female preferences for morphological traits of male guppies, bu t is also much more effective in detecting preferences than the other two techniques, because it eliminates temporal variation in male behav iour. (C) 1997 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.