Direct benefits and costs for hybridizing Ficedula flycatchers

Direct benefits and costs for hybridizing Ficedula flycatchers

It is well understood that females may gain direct benefits from breeding with attractive males. However, the direct fitness effects of mate‐choice are rarely considered with respect to mating between different species (hybridization), a field dominated by discussion of indirect costs of producing u...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of evolutionary biology Vol. 20; no. 3; pp. 854 - 864
Main Authors: WILEY, C., FOGELBERG, N., SæTHER, S. A., VEEN, T., SVEDIN, N., KEHLENBECK, J. VOGEL, QVARNSTRÖM, A.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01-05-2007
Subjects:
Animal reproduction
Animals
Biologi
Biology
Breeding
Diet
Ecology
Evolutionary biology
Female
Ficedula
Hybridization
Hybridization, Genetic
Hypotheses
Male
mate-choice
Mating Preference, Animal
NATURAL SCIENCES
NATURVETENSKAP
Nesting Behavior
niche partitioning
parental effort
Passeriformes - genetics
Passeriformes - physiology
sexual selection
Territoriality
territory quality
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Summary:It is well understood that females may gain direct benefits from breeding with attractive males. However, the direct fitness effects of mate‐choice are rarely considered with respect to mating between different species (hybridization), a field dominated by discussion of indirect costs of producing unfit hybrid offspring. Hybridizing females may also gain by the types of direct benefits that are important for intraspecific mate choice, and in addition may have access to certain benefits that are restricted to mating with males of an ecologically diverged sister‐taxon. We investigate possible direct benefits and costs female Ficedula flycatchers gain from breeding with a heterospecific male, and demonstrate that hybridizing female collared flycatchers (F. albicollis) breed in territories that do not suffer the seasonal decline in habitat quality experienced by females breeding with conspecifics. We exclude the hypotheses that heterospecific males provide alternative food‐types or assume a greater amount of the parental workload. In fact, the diets of the two species (F. albicollis and F. hypoleuca) were highly similar, suggesting possible interspecific competition over food resources in sympatry. We discuss the implications of direct fitness effects of hybridization, and why there has been such a disparity in the attention paid to such benefits and costs with regard to intraspecific and interspecific mate‐choice.
Bibliography:Stein Are Sæther, Netherlands Institute of Ecology, Centre for Terrestrial Ecology, PO Box 40, 6666 ZG Heteren, The Netherlands
Present address
ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
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content type line 23
ISSN:1010-061X
1420-9101
1420-9101
DOI:10.1111/j.1420-9101.2007.01316.x