Rice Marissa A, Galindez Sydney M, Garner Joshua T, Ophir Alexander G
Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.
Department of Integrative Biology, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078, USA.
R Soc Open Sci. 2022 Oct 5;9(10):220298. doi: 10.1098/rsos.220298. eCollection 2022 Oct.
With whom and how often to mate are fundamental questions that impact individual reproductive success and the mating system. Relatively few studies have investigated female mating tactics compared with males. Here, we asked how differential access to mates influences the occurrence of mixed paternity and overall reproductive success in socially monogamous female prairie voles (). We created male- and female-biased sex ratios of prairie voles living in semi-natural outdoor enclosures. We ran paternity analyses to determine the identity and number of mating partners females had and the number of offspring produced. We found that 57.1% of females had litters fathered by two or more males when males outnumbered females, and 87.5% of females had litters with more than one father when females outnumbered males. However, the percentage of mixed paternity and the total number of embryos were not statistically different between social contexts. We determined that female fecundity (i.e. number of embryos) correlated with the number of male fathers in each litter across social contexts. Although our study did not support the hypothesis that social context directly influences female mating decisions, it did suggest that female multi-male mating might lead to increased fertilization success under semi-natural conditions.
与谁交配以及交配频率是影响个体繁殖成功率和交配系统的基本问题。与雄性相比，研究雌性交配策略的研究相对较少。在此，我们探讨了在社会一夫一妻制的雌性草原田鼠中，获得配偶的差异如何影响混合父权的发生和总体繁殖成功率。我们在半自然户外围栏中创造了雄性和雌性数量不均衡的草原田鼠性别比例。我们进行了父权分析，以确定雌性的交配伙伴的身份和数量以及所产幼崽的数量。我们发现，当雄性数量超过雌性时，57.1%的雌性所产幼崽有两个或更多雄性作为父亲；当雌性数量超过雄性时，87.5%的雌性所产幼崽有不止一个父亲。然而，在不同社会环境下，混合父权的比例和胚胎总数在统计学上并无差异。我们确定，在不同社会环境下，雌性的繁殖力（即胚胎数量）与每窝幼崽中雄性父亲的数量相关。虽然我们的研究不支持社会环境直接影响雌性交配决策这一假设，但确实表明在半自然条件下，雌性与多个雄性交配可能会提高受精成功率。
