Author
Listed:
- Pablo Polo
- Victoria Hernández-Lloreda
- Fernando Colmenares
Abstract
During male takeovers, in addition to fighting off the female’s current mating partner, males may exhibit intense aggressive mate guarding of the newly acquired females. Recent studies indicate that coercive sexual aggression by males is an important strategy through which sexual conflict is expressed. Previous tests of the sexual coercion hypothesis in primates have focused on assessing if female mate choice is effectively reduced by male aggression, however, only one recent study has tested a critical prediction of this hypothesis, namely, that male coercion is reproductively costly to victim females. The present study uses 15 years of data on inter-birth intervals from a large multilevel colony of baboons, mostly Papio h. hamadryas, with a mating system based on harem-defence polygyny to examine if male takeovers impact the length of the abducted females’ inter-birth intervals. Our analysis of 121 inter-birth intervals from 45 adult females indicates that male takeovers are reproductively costly to abducted females as they are associated with an increase in the time they take to conceive and a lengthening of the inter-birth intervals. We discuss how several factors may contribute to this reproductive cost, including male-female sexual conflict, male-male competition, and female-female competition. Our findings suggest that the male’s aggressive herding is the main contributor to the abducted females’ immediate reproductive cost. We argue that although some of the male’s aggressive herding may be driven by male-male competition, nonetheless, it serves a coercive function as it both constrains the female’s mate choice options and hampers her immediate breeding performance. This conclusion is backed up by results obtained in the only other study that has tested the same prediction and which has been carried out in a wild population of hamadryas baboons.
Suggested Citation
Pablo Polo & Victoria Hernández-Lloreda & Fernando Colmenares, 2014.
"Male Takeovers Are Reproductively Costly to Females in Hamadryas Baboons: A Test of the Sexual Coercion Hypothesis,"
PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 9(3), pages 1-7, March.
Handle:
RePEc:plo:pone00:0090996
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0090996
Download full text from publisher
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0090996. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.