The use of multimodal communication in mate choice decisions by female house crickets, Acheta domesticus

Females of various animal taxa benefit from mating with large males, and size is often communicated through different signal modalities. In male house crickets, Acheta domesticus, size is positively correlated with heritable immunocompetence and the proportion of three-pulse chirps in the male's calling song. Although females can use these acoustic signals to choose desirable males, little is known about how these acoustic signals interact with other signal modalities. We investigated whether females prefer large males in the absence of acoustic signals. In tournament style two-choice tests, wing-clipped males that were mounted first on consecutive trials had a significantly larger mass on average than wing-clipped males that were not mounted first in both trials. We also used 100 two-choice tests to verify female acoustic preferences. Female house crickets spent significantly more time near speakers playing the calling song of a large male than the calling song of a small male. Finally, we pre-exposed females to a calling song recording from a small or large male and then presented the female with a small or large wing-clipped male to determine whether calling song or nonacoustic signals were weighed more heavily by females. Females had a lower latency to mount when presented with a large male, regardless of the quality of the calling song to which females had been pre-exposed. However, a high-quality calling song still decreased females' latency to mount small males. These results suggest that females assess size using long-range acoustic signals, but also reassess size using more proximate nonacoustic signals. (C) 2012 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.