ORIGINAL PAPER Mate attraction by females in a sexually cannibalistic praying mantis Jonathan P. Lelito & William D. Brown Received: 3 June 2008 / Accepted: 16 September 2008 / Published online: 8 October 2008 # Springer-Verlag 2008 Abstract We studied mate attraction by females of the praying mantid, Tenodera aridifolia sinensis, testing honest signaling of mate availability versus deceptive signaling to attract males for sexual cannibalism. We experimentally varied female diet and mating history and measured the rate of attraction of a wild population of males to caged females. Honest signaling theory predicts that virgin females will attract males at the greatest rate whereas deceptive signaling predicts that hungry females (which are more likely to cannibalize males) will attract more males, particularly among non-virgin females. Our results show that hungry females did not attract more males than well- fed females. Indeed, the opposite was true: hungry females attracted significantly fewer males. Moreover, hungry females were no more likely than well-fed females to attract males subsequent to mating, and mated females attracted males at a lower rate than did virgin females. We also observed female T. aridifolia sinensis and male Mantis religiosa arriving at the caged females and we discuss the significance of these observations. The results refute the hypothesis of deceptive signaling and show that mate attraction signals of female T. aridifolia sinensis are honest indicators of female mate availability and a lower risk of sexual cannibalism. Keywords Mantodea . Honest signaling . Pheromones . Praying mantis . Sexual cannibalism . Sexual attraction Introduction Models of animal communication demonstrate that, to remain functional, communication systems must remain honest “on average” (Johnstone and Grafen 1993, p. 759). However, significant dishonesty by a subset of the popu- lation may be part of an evolutionarily stable signaling system (see Krakauer and Johnstone 1995; Johnstone 1998). Dishonesty may evolve when individuals differ in either the costs they pay for signaling (Johnstone and Grafen 1993), or the payoffs of deceiving a receiver (Rowell et al. 2006), particularly when costs to the receiver of fully assessing a signaler are high (Dawkins and Guilford 1991). Examples of intraspecific signal dishonesty include aggressive bluffing, such as the meral-spread threat displays of newly molted stomatopods that cannot fight effectively (Adams and Caldwell 1990), and the calls of male Blanchard’ s cricket frogs (Wagner 1989) and green tree frogs (Bee et al. 2000) that lower their pitch to resemble larger males. Sexual cannibalism in mantids, spiders, and other taxa creates an opportunity to study signal honesty in the context of extreme conflicts of interests between males and females. Females of these species may be selected to improve their ability to exploit conspecific males as prey if they benefit nutritionally from cannibalism, as is the case in Tenodera aridifolia sinensis (Eisenberg and Hurd 1977; Eisenberg et al. 1981) and some other mantids (Matsura and Mooroka 1983; Birkhead et al. 1988). The typical mating system of mantids involves active mate searching by males, which is guided by airborne sex pheromones in most (seven of eight) species for which mate-searching cues have been studied. In several species, females engage in distinctive abdominal flexing, which exposes abdominal pheromone glands (Edmunds 1975; Robinson and Robinson 1979). Kelner- Behav Ecol Sociobiol (2008) 63:313–320 DOI 10.1007/s00265-008-0663-8 Communicated by M. Elgar J. P. Lelito : W. D. Brown (*) Department of Biology, State University of New York at Fredonia, Fredonia, NY 14063, USA e-mail: William.Brown@fredonia.edu