26 November -  Joe Manson UCLA Anthropology Nonfecundable Matings as a Test of Male "Quality" in Primates     Although empirically linked, and often conflated in writings about female primate sexual behavior, mating during nonfecundable periods and mating with multiple males are logically distinct phenomena.  In this paper, a hypothesis accounting for the former phenomenon is proposed and subject to preliminary tests:  females mate during nonfecundable periods to test male "quality" while the costs of copulating with a low-quality male are relatively low.  Courtship rituals, copulation itself, and third parties' reactions to witnessing copulations could provide females with reliable information about a male's health, strength, physical coordination, willingness to incur costs to benefit a particular female, and willingness to incur risks in the form of aggression by rival males.  Females could compare males to each other, and/or compare the same male's courtship and copulatory performance at different times.  In cross-species comparisons, this hypothesis leads to the predictions that mating during nonfecundable periods will characterize species and situations in which (1) females encounter a large number of prospective mating partners, and (2) mating behavior is more elaborate (e.g. long courtship sequences, complex courtship-specific behaviors, multi-mount copulations, and/or long copulatory bouts), thereby providing females with a lot of information.  Neither prediction was supported in preliminary analyses.  Data from free-ranging rhesus macaques were analyzed to determine whether fertile females preferentially maintained proximity to males that had completed longer mount series with them (controlling for male dominance rank) during previous infecundable copulations.  A non-significant trend in this direction was found.