Male Mating Strategies through Manipulation of Female-perceived Predation Risk: A Minireview and a Hypothesis

In this minireview we focus on how males may exploit female’s sensitivity to predation risk in thecontext of mating. It has been shown in studies on guppies and jumping spiders that in response to alteredfemale behaviors, which are adaptations to the unfavorable environment and a consequence of females’ highersensitivity to predator’s presence as well as females’ higher predation risk, males can adopt condition-dependentmating tactics. It appears that in such cases males do not modify their reproductive behavior directly in responseto their own perception of predation risk, but indirectly in response to changes in female behavior induced bypredator presence. It has also been recently shown in crabs that males can exploit female behavior by creatingsafer habitat spots, which increases the male mating success. Hence all the evidence suggests that males notonly respond to female sensitivity to the natural variation in predation risk, but that males can also exploit femalebehavior by altering the environment. As a logical extension of these findings, we present a hypothesis that incertain conditions males can manipulate the environment in order to increase the predation risk and to inducefemale behaviors that enhance the male’s mating success with the increased predation risk. We propose thatsuch a manipulation to increase predation risk is expected to evolve in males of species with a strong sexualconflict and female-biased predation risk. Although empirical evidence has not been yet shown, initialobservations in a water strider species in Korea, Gerris gracilicornis, seem to support this hypothesis.