The benefits of costly signaling: Meriam turtle hunters

Hunting, particularly when it involves large game that is extensivelyshared, has been suggested to serve as a form of costly signalingby hunters, serving to attract mates and allies or to detercompetitors. Empirical evidence presented elsewhere on turtlehunting practiced by Meriam people of Torres Strait, Australia,supports several key predictions of the costly signaling account.Here we present evidence from the same study bearing on anotherkey prediction, that signalers (hunters) gain social and reproductivebenefits. Specifically, we find that successful hunters gainsocial recognition, have an earlier onset of reproduction, achievehigher age-specific reproductive success, and gain higher qualitymates, who also achieve above-average reproductive success.Meriam hunters also average more mates (women who bear theiroffspring) and more co-resident sexual partners than other men,and these partners (but not mates) are significantly younger.Several lines of evidence thus support the idea that huntingis a form of costly signaling in this population. Alternativehypotheses involving reciprocity (from grateful recipients ofmeat) and direct offspring provisioning by hunters are not consistentwith available evidence, but in the absence of experimentalmanipulation we cannot rule out a role for phenotypic correlation.