Copying Others, an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy for Mate Choice: A Model

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Abstract
Mating success is one source of information that can be used for mate choice. In its purest state, females would mate with the male chosen by most of the other females. Copiers should at least do no worse than choosers, which ignore mating success and mate according to their own assessment of male fitness. A stochastic simulation of mate choice in a lek demonstrated a clear advantage for the copying strategy. This advantage is realized when (1) the choosing ability of those females who do choose is skewed toward selecting the fittest males, (2) fecundity is low, and (3) assessment of male mating success is based on several samples of the lek. Even with these conditions, copiers lost their advantage when they made up the bulk of the population. Either choosers had a clear advantage when copiers lacked any ability to assess male fitness, or if copiers were able to assess male fitness but did so only if no males were observed mating, there was no clear fitness advantage accrued by either copying or choosing, and relative success was highly variable. If females are not able to accurately determine male genetic quality, then copying should not exist. Copying, combined with an ability to choose, might be considered a conditional evolutionarily stable strategy. A mixed population of choosers and copiers in an evolutionarily stable state is likely if copiers lack any ability to assess male fitness characteristics.