Sexual Imprinting and Evolutionary Processes in Birds: a Reassessment
ADVANCES IN THE STUDY OF BEHAVIOR, VOL. 28 Sexual Imprinting and Evolutionary Processes in Birds: A Reassessment CARELTEN CATE BEHAVIORAL BIOLOGY INSTITUTE OF EVOLUTIONARY AND ECOLOGICAL SCIENCES LEIDEN UNIVERSITY,2300 RA LEIDEN,THE NETHERLANDS DAVER. Vos ETHOLOGY UNIVERSITY OF GRONINGEN 9750 AA HAREN,THE NETHERLANDS Both in the past and up to the present, birds have figured prominently as models in several areas of evolutionary biology, such as those of specia- tion (e.g., Mayr, 1963) and sexual selection (e.g., Andersson, 1994; Mprller, 1994). Mate choice mediates these evolutionary processes and, although the actual choices and their functional and evolutionary significance have been studied intensively, noticeably less research has addressed the devel- opment of mate preferences. It has long been known that certain birds acquire their mate preferences through the developmental process known as “sexual imprinting,’’ in which sexual preferences are acquired through learning the characteristics of the parents. It has been acknowledged that sexual imprinting might play a role in evolutionary processes like speciation (e.g., Seiger, 1967; Gill and Murray, 1972; Grant and Grant, 1996, 1997), the evolution of interspecific brood parasitism (Nicolai, 1964; Payne, 1973; Payne and Payne, 1998), and sexual selection (e.g., Gould and Gould, 1989; Christidis and Schodde, 1993; Andersson, 1994, pp. 438-439) and that the implications of this must be elucidated. Nevertheless, the mechanism does not figure in most theoretical models of evolutionary processes. For in- stance, while many models of sexual selection have been explicitly inspired by research on birds (e.g., O’Donald, 1980; Lande, 1981; Andersson, 1986), a common assumption in these models is that variation in mate preference is due to genetic variation and that preferences are inherited by genetic transfer from one generation to the next.
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