Question

While studying the communities in the Sonoran Desert, you notice that gray fox parents both raise their offspring. After the young are weaned from the mother, the father fox teaches their offspring to stalk and pounce for successful hunting. What kind of behavior is this? How might this behavior contribute to speciation?

Answer 1

This kind of behaviour is Imprinting.

Sexual imprinting—a phenomenon in which offspring learn parental traits and later use them as a model for their own mate preferences—can generate reproductive barriers between species.

When the target of imprinting is a mating trait that differs among young lineages, imprinted preferences may contribute to behavioural isolation and facilitate speciation.

However, in most models of speciation by sexual selection, divergent natural selection is also required; the latter acts to generate and maintain variation in the sexually selected trait or traits, and in the mating preferences that act upon them.

Imprinting, in addition to mediating female mate preferences, can shape biases in male–male aggression. These biases can act similarly to natural selection to maintain variation in traits and mate preferences, which facilitates reproductive isolation driven entirely by sexual selection.