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Courtship strategies of male insects: when is learning advantageous?

Research in the past few decades has established that insects rely heavily on learning for a variety of tasks. Recently, it has also been documented that male and female insects learn in the context of sexual behaviour. These findings challenge the traditional views that male insects are either indiscriminate or rely on genetically programmed rules for courtship. It is not intuitively clear when male insects can benefit from learning in the context of courtship. Hence we investigated the conditions favouring learning during courtship in insects by using a model that compared a learning strategy to two alternatives, indiscriminate courtship, which means courting all females encountered, and innate selectivity, implying the adoption of a fixed criterion above which females are courted. Our model identifies the settings under which learning during courtship is most likely to evolve.

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