Mating in the blink of an eye: Evolutionary causes and consequences of mating duration

• Applicant: Lennart Winkler, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Evolution, Anthropology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 568849791

Mating is essential in sexually reproducing animals to ensure offspring production and, ultimately, biological fitness. Yet, mating takes many different forms and animals evolved a multitude of ways to solve the crucial challenge of mating. Hence, evolution has led to an extraordinary diversity of mating organs in both females and males, as well as a stark variety of mating behaviours. Particularly, the duration of mating is staggeringly variable between and within species. It can last from fractions of a second to many hours. However, the evolutionary drivers that led to this variation and its ecological consequences remain largely unexplored.I propose to address these knowledge gaps using both comparative as well as experimental approaches: First, I will use large-scale phylogenetic-comparative analyses to investigate the evolution of mating duration across the animal kingdom. With this I will strengthen our understanding of the evolutionary drivers of mating duration, for instance by examining the role of sexual selection, ecology, and physiological constrains in the evolution of mating duration. I anticipate that this large-scale data set will not only be a valuable resource for testing hypotheses about the evolution of mating duration using phylogenetic comparative data, but will also generate new hypotheses inspiring future research.Second, I will investigate the consequences of high-speed mating in a livebearing fish, the pygmy halfbeak. I will study the transfer of sperm and its relationship with both female and male mating behaviour. The pygmy halfbeak has one of the fastest mating behaviours in the animal kingdom, making it an ideal system to study the consequences of rapid mating. I will use professional high-speed video recordings of staged matings and use a full-factorial experimental design that manipulates mating experience independent of age for both females and males. This will not only allow me to describe rapid female and male behaviours during mating and quantify variation in mating duration and precision, but also to address more fundamental questions on the consequences of high-speed mating regarding both sperm transfer and female choice. Overall, by investigating the causes and consequences of mating duration, I will address a variety of open questions in evolutionary biology and behavioural ecology.

• DFG Programme: WBP Fellowship
• International Connection: Sweden
• Host: Professor Dr. John L Fitzpatrick