Keeping up appearances: male fiddler crabs wave faster in a crowd

Abstract

Courtship displays are often energetically and temporally costly as well as highly conspicuous to predators. Selection should therefore favour signalling tactics that minimize courtship costs while maintaining or increasing signal attractiveness. In fiddler crabs, males court females by waving their one greatly enlarged claw in a highly conspicuous and costly display. Here, we investigate whether courting males adjust their wave rate, and therefore the cost of courtship, to the current level of competition.We show that display rate increases as competition increases and that when competition is removed, males reduce their display rate by 30 per cent. These results suggest that male fiddler crabs actively reduce the cost of courtship by adjusting their wave rate in response to the immediate level of competition.