How to Forage for a Mate?

TL;DR

This paper models mate choice as an optimal foraging problem, providing a mechanistic decision-making framework that explains how animals choose mates based on environmental signals and decision thresholds.

Contribution

It introduces an analytically tractable, optimal foraging-inspired model of mate choice decision-making, linking it to signal availability and decision thresholds.

Findings

Sensitive leaving thresholds are favored regardless of signal availability.

Optimal commitment thresholds depend on signal richness, with richer environments favoring less eager strategies.

The model explains how animals adapt their mate choice strategies to environmental conditions.

Abstract

Foraging is a central decision-making behavior performed by all animals, essential to garnishing enough energy for an organism to survive. Similarly, mating is crucial for evolutionary continuity and offspring production. Mate choice is one of the central tenets of sexual selection, driving major evolutionary processes, and can be regarded as a decision-making process between potential mating partners. Often researchers have used coarse-grained models to describe macroscopic phenomenology pertaining to mate choice without detailed quantitative mechanisms of how animals use individual and environmental signals to guide their mating decisions. In this letter, we show that mate choice can be cast as a foraging problem, and we present an analytically tractable optimal foraging-inspired mechanistic theory of decision-making underlying mate choice. We begin from the premise that deciding upon which partner with which to mate is at its core a stochastic decision-making process. Agents adopt a variety of decision strategies, tuned by decision thresholds for leaving or committing to a mate. We find that sensitive leaving thresholds are favored independently of signal availability in the population. By contrast, optimal thresholds for committing to a mate depend upon signal availability in the population, with signal-rich populations generally favoring less eager strategies compared to signal-poor populations.