Choosy female PP
Intersexual selection in animal behavior involves mate choice, usually done by the female because they invest more energy into each offspring. Some direct benefits that may come from a choosy female include nuptial gifts, parental care, territory quality, and resource benefits. Nuptial gifts are presents a male might bring a female to encourage her to mate with him. These are often prey items, such as in the empid fly, spermatophores, such as in insects or salamanders, or actual body parts of the partner, like how female crickets are allowed to gnaw off the wing of a male they are mating with. Being choosy can benefit the female by providing her with better parental care. This is true in stickeback fish, where males with red bellies are preferrable since they indicate that he will be better at fanning the eggs with oxygen after they are fertilized. Territory quality is another way the female benefits from being choosy. Lots of female birds will assess a territory established by the male before choosing him, ensuring her a safe place to mate and rear her young. Lastly, there are other resource benefits a chosen male may provide. In chimpanzees, males provide the females with food, and in dung beetles, males provide a dung ball for food and a place to mate. These hypotheses are not mutually exclusive, meaning that in any given species more than one can be true at any time.
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