Lekking as collective behaviour and spatial ecological system

Lekking is an unusual mating system in which males typically defend small aggregated territories that are the sites of most matings; because these territories do not contain resources attractive to females and there is no paternal care, females are thought to visit leks for the sole purpose of mating. Lekking is a costly behaviour where males engage in exaggerated displays and compete vigorously to gain matings. There are various hypotheses – ranging from predation avoidance benefit to mate-sampling benefit – that explain the evolution of lek mating strategy. These hypotheses have been tested in many animal species and the factors that favour the evolution of lekking seem to differ from species to species. Moreover, some studies indicate that multiple processes may be acting at different spatial scales in a population to favour lekking. Classical methods of studying animal behaviour provided fascinating insights to test these hypotheses at a broader level, however, these methods pose a trade-off between spatial and temporal resolution at which data can be acquired. Therefore, we propose a framework that views lekking as a collective behaviour phenomenon where the formation and maintenance of lek arises from local spatial interactions at a proximate level and these interactions amplify to produce the patterns at global level  (i.e. mate choice patterns and skewed mating success on leks). Studies in the field of collective behaviour exploring the foraging and anti-predation dynamics have provided key insights about the mechanistic underpinnings of natural selection. We argue that a similar approach considering lekking as a collective phenomenon and therefore studying it at fine spatial and temporal resolution would aid immensely in understanding the proximate and ultimate dynamics of lekking. Our proposed framework considers lekking as a collective system that takes into account all the interactions between individuals at a fine spatio-temporal scale with the aid of high resolution aerial videos combined and automated tracking of animals in these videos. We implement the concepts from collective behaviour to study blackbuck (Antilope cervicapra) leks.

Publication:

Rathore A., Isvaran K., Guttal V. (2022). Lekking as collective behaviour. (Accepted). Philosophical Transactions B. doi - https://doi.org/0.1098/rstb.2022.0066