Definition
A female mate choice occurring during or after copulation.
Introduction
Sexual selection, the selection pressure selecting for traits that increase reproductive success of individuals, can in principle operate though processes occurring both before and during/after copulations and being male or female driven. Prior to copulation, these are typically seen as male-male competition of access to females as mating partners and female choice of mating partners. When females mate with multiple males (i.e., are polyandrous), these processes can continue during or after copulations as sperm competition and cryptic female choice, respectively. The latter is a female postcopulatory mate choice where females bias fertilization in favor of certain males, based on the phenotype of the male or his sperm (Eberhard 1996). The term is called “cryptic” because this form of female choice can be hard to observe, for example,...
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References
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Løvlie, H. (2016). Cryptic Female Choice. In: Weekes-Shackelford, V., Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_74-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_74-1
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