title: Negative effects of prolonged dietary restriction on male mating effort: nuptial gifts as honest indicators of long-term male condition.
abstract: The handicap principle proposes that sexual signals must be costly to be honest. Honesty may be maintained by the costs paid by honest signallers or by the potential costs of cheating. In the latter, handicaps should emerge as a consequence of specific biological constraints, such as life-history trade-offs. Nuptial prey-giving arthropods are good systems to investigate the honesty of sexual signals taking into account trade-offs between self-maintenance and mating effort. We experimentally evaluated if prolonged food shortage during early adulthood imposes long-term negative effects on gift construction by males of the spider Paratrechalea ornata. We also evaluated whether a burst of food availability improved body condition of poorly fed males, increasing their frequency of gift construction. Poorly fed males hardly constructed gifts, even after a marked increase in feeding rate, which clearly improved their body condition. Moreover, initially poorly fed males that latter received high food intake constructed lighter gifts than continuously well fed males. The long-term effects of prolonged dietary restriction on male propensity to construct a gift and on the size of this gift may increase the honesty of this sexually selected signal. From the female's perspective the offer of a gift may bring information on male quality.
authors.affiliation: Programa de Pós-graduação em Ecologia, Instituto de Biociências, Universidade de São Paulo, Rua do Matão, trav. 14, n° 321, São Paulo, SP, 05508-090, Brazil.|LAGE do Departamento de Ecologia, Instituto de Biociências, Universidade de São Paulo, Rua do Matão, trav. 14, n° 321, São Paulo, SP, 05508-090, Brazil.
authors.forename: Renato C
authors.initials: RC
authors.lastname: Macedo-Rego
authors.affiliation: LAGE do Departamento de Ecologia, Instituto de Biociências, Universidade de São Paulo, Rua do Matão, trav. 14, n° 321, São Paulo, SP, 05508-090, Brazil.|Programa de Pós-graduação em Biologia, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos, Avenida Unisinos, 950, São Leopoldo, RS, 93022-000, Brazil.|Laboratorio de Biología Reproductiva y Evolución, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Instituto de Diversidad y Ecología Animal (IDEA - CONICET), Avenida Vélez Sarsfield, 299, Córdoba Capital, CP: 5000, Argentina.
authors.forename: Luiz Ernesto
authors.initials: LE
authors.lastname: Costa-Schmidt
authors.affiliation: LAGE do Departamento de Ecologia, Instituto de Biociências, Universidade de São Paulo, Rua do Matão, trav. 14, n° 321, São Paulo, SP, 05508-090, Brazil.|Departamento de Zoologia, Instituto de Biociências, Universidade de São Paulo, Rua do Matão, trav. 14, n° 321, São Paulo, SP, 05508-090, Brazil.
authors.forename: Eduardo S A
authors.initials: ES
authors.lastname: Santos
authors.affiliation: LAGE do Departamento de Ecologia, Instituto de Biociências, Universidade de São Paulo, Rua do Matão, trav. 14, n° 321, São Paulo, SP, 05508-090, Brazil.
authors.forename: Glauco
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Machado
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D049628:Body Size; D004038:Diet, Reducing; D008297:Male; D012726:Sexual Behavior, Animal / Q000502:physiology*; D013112:Spiders