Organisms are constantly faced with trade-offs because they are energetically and temporally limited. Reproduction and survival behaviors are an excellent example of a trade-off becuase behaviors that increase reproduction do not also increase survival. In this experiment, we are focusing on the trade-off between death-feigning (organisms mimics death to avoid predation, effectively increasing survival) and movement in search of oviposition sites and mates (increasing movement distance can increase encounter rate with potential mates or high quality oviposition sites).
We are conducting a fully factorial experiment with two variables: size of nuptial gift (virgin male with large nuptial gift, non-virgin male with small nuptial gift, and female not mated so receives no nuptial gift) and environmental food (food provided or no food provided).
