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Congenital predispositions and early social experience determine the courtship patterns of males of the Amarillo fish

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Abstract

Mounting evidence indicates that learning shapes fish foraging and social behavior, which suggests that it may also underlie the frequently reported geographic variation in courtship. In this study, we analyzed how early social experience influences courtship patterns in males of the Amarillo fish (Girardinichthys multiradiatus). In a first experiment, we quantified the courtship of males from two allopatric populations grown in isolation and estimated the heritability of a key attribute of their courtship patterns. Then, we raised males from two allopatric populations with either sympatric or allopatric females and at two different densities, and registered their adult courtship patterns towards females from a third population. We found that the courtship pattern of males has a significant heritable component, yet in the second experiment, it was influenced by what type of females males were raised with, by their social rank (dominant/subordinate/singleton), and by the behavior of the female that they were courting. We conclude that courtship behavior in this fish has a congenital predisposition and is affected during development by different aspects of early experience and seemingly remains flexible throughout life; a complex ontogenetic trajectory that under natural conditions may have led to the locally stable dialect types observed in the courtship patterns of males from allopatric populations.

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Acknowledgments

We thank S. Herce Castañón, E. Ávila, J. Aguirre, and P. Gesundheit for considerable help in the field; SEMARNAT for the fishing permission (01290/13); M. Méndez Janovitz for recording the fish behavior; and S. Herce Castañón and A. Ojeda Laguna for filming the fish. C. Berea de la Rosa collected the data on heritability, which was part of a larger project funded with CONACyT grant 1616-N9208 to CMG. We thank two anonymous referees and the Associate Editor for very valuable comments and criticism.

Ethical standards

In the design and conduct of the experiments, we followed the ethical guidelines for the use of animals in research published by ASAB/ABS. All the experiments complied with Mexican legislation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Ecología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, A.P. 70-275, C. P. Coyoacán, México City, D.F., Mexico

    Constantino Macías Garcia

  2. Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EJ, UK

    Ornela De Gasperin

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  1. Ornela De Gasperin
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  2. Constantino Macías Garcia
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Correspondence to Ornela De Gasperin or Constantino Macías Garcia.

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Communicated by A. Pilastro

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De Gasperin, O., Macías Garcia, C. Congenital predispositions and early social experience determine the courtship patterns of males of the Amarillo fish. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 68, 639–648 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-013-1678-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-013-1678-3

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