Opportunity costs resulting from scramble competition within the choosy sex severely impair mate choosiness.

12 pages; International audience; Studies on mate choice mainly focus on the evolution of signals that would maximize the probability of finding a good-quality partner. Most models of sexual selection rely on the implicit assumption that individuals can freely compare and spot the best mates in a heterogeneous population. Comparatively few studies have investigated the consequences of the mate-sampling process. Several sampling strategies have been studied from theoretical or experimental perspectives. They belong to two families of decision rules: best-of-n strategies (individuals sample n partners before choosing the best one within this pool) or threshold strategies (individuals sequenti…