Humans are not the only species that lie to have sex, according to an Ohio State researcher.
Some male topi antelopes use deception to gain extra chances to mate with females, said Wiline Pangle, an evolution, ecology and organismal biology lecturer for OSU and co-author of the study.
Topi antelopes use an alarm snort and look toward the predator to warn other topis that a predator is near, communicate where it is and alert the predator that it is spotted.
Predators, such as lions, use stealth to capture their prey, and if they do not have this advantage will usually give up, Pangle said.
But some male topi antelopes use this snort for other purposes.
A female topi antelope will be receptive to mating for one day a year. Typically, she will travel through about four territories and mate about 11 times, Pangle said.
When the female goes through a male’s territory, she will mate and go on her way. This is when the male will spring into action.
As the female is leaving, some males begin snorting and look in the direction the female is heading. The female then stops, fearing a predator.
The male uses this to his advantage, using the ruse to mate with the receptive female a couple more times.
In theory, animals deceiving other animals should not be rare.
Animals’ use of deception stems from a cost-and-benefit analysis. If good information might save an animal’s life and bad information might not risk its life, then it is worth it to use deception, Pangle said.
But there are few known examples of animals using deception.
Another animal that uses deception is the plover, a type of bird, which lies to protect its offspring. It pretends to have a broken wing, and the predator follows it away from its nest.
The male topi antelopes’ use of deception is unusual, however, because it involves mating. Also, not all male topis do it, which is why the females fall for it.
The study started as a casual dinner conversation.
Pangle was observing hyenas in the wild when Jakob Bro-Jørgensen, a mammalian behavior and evolution research associate at the University of Liverpool and co-author of the study, came to her about the antelopes’ use of deception.
Pangle and Bro-Jørgensen were sharing stories from the field during dinner. Bro-Jørgensen told the story of the antelopes, and they agreed it was something that needed to be studied, she said.
“I knew, in the literature, there were very few examples of reports of deception,” Pangle said.
What followed was a four-year study, from 2004 to 2009, of topi antelopes’ mating habits.
Bro-Jørgensen, who has studied topis since 1998, noticed the deception when he was following a female topi as part of his doctoral work, Bro-Jørgensen said.
The study took place in Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya. The reserve is part of a Tanzania’s Serengeti ecosystem but has a different name because it is in Kenya.
It is like Africa’s Yellowstone National Park, Pangle said.
They watched 53 mating topi females for a total of 274 hours. They recorded the snorts males made for sound analysis, which showed that the true and false snorts were identical.
The study, “Male topi antelopes alarm snort deceptively to retain females for mating,” is available in the online version of the The American Naturalist and will be published in the July issue. A video and a recording of the snorts accompany the online version.
The money for the study came from the European Union, through the Marie Curie program, the Research Councils UK and the Zoological Society of London.
