Display consistency in swallow-tailed manakins: group size effects and implications for female choice

Courtship displays indicate individual quality and can direct mate choice. Cooperative displays are particularly interesting because the choice can be complex, involving the evaluation of multiple individuals' coordination. Here, we characterize the consistency of the cooperative display of the swallow-tailed manakin (Chiroxiphia caudata), in which males aggregate in courtship groups of up to six individuals. We generated a time series of a set of displays and calculated its temporal frequency, number of males and consistency. We applied the recurrence quantification analysis to characterize consistency in terms of two metrics that describe the overall pattern-recurrence rate and determinism-and one metric that detects subtle changes on the display-microstate entropy. We assumed that consistency increases as the first two measures increase and the latter decreases. Our results revealed that microstate entropy was the only metric sensitive to group size, suggesting that males reduce individual energy expenditure through cooperative displays. Despite the dance's overall stability across group sizes, females preferentially visited and copulated with males performing highly consistent displays (higher recurrence rate, lower microstate entropy). This demonstrates that fine-scale temporal precision-rather than display frequency or group size-drives female choice, implicating consistency as a target of sexual selection in swallow-tailed manakins.