Male mating tactics are associated with distinct female cognitive-behavioral profiles in 4 poeciliids

Abstract Male mating tactics, the morphological and behavioral traits that males employ to access potential mates, alter female space use, time budget, and ecology in ways that may have downstream consequences for female behavior and cognition. Courtship tactics, in which males display and females exercise preferences, are common in some taxa. In others, coercive tactics, in which males force matings with limited female choice, predominate. Because behavior and cognition often transcend a single context, we ask whether variation in male mating tactics predictably shapes female behavior and cognition outside of mating. Controlling for predation by using populations housed in ecologically identical mesocosms for multiple generations, we compared female behavioral and cognitive traits of 4 different species across the teleost fish family Poeciliidae. We compared all-coercive Gambusia vittata and Heterandria formosa to Limia perugiae and Xiphophorus nigrensis, species with both coercion and courtship. We assessed females on sociability, activity, boldness, stress movement, cognitive flexibility, and spatial learning. Mating system predicted variation in movement patterns, cognitive flexibility, and spatial learning. Mixed-tactic species showed higher activity, stress movement, and cognitive flexibility than coercion-only taxa. In spatial learning, the all-coercive G. vittata had the highest accuracy and was the only species to show evidence for learning across trials. Multivariate approaches identified movement traits as the largest factors differing between mating systems in cognitive-behavioral syndromes. This work provides the first suggestion that species-level variation in poeciliid male mating tactics is a potential factor contributing to differences in female behavior, cognition, and cognitive-behavioral syndromes.