Horned beetles demonstrate alternative mating strategies due to different nutritious conditions during development that affect adult body size. In this species, males who receive high levels of nutrition during development will surpass a size threshold above which they develop large horns. Males who do not pass the threshold will develop either small or nonexistent horns. These varying phenotypes will lead individual males to adopt different mating strategies. Those who develop long horns will practice mate guarding, protecting the entrance to the tunnel in which a female is resting or feeding. These males will fight any male that attempts to enter. This is a common strategy observed in populations in which females are dispersed and have synchronized periods of fertility, as well as those in which females are found in clusters that can be guarded to maintain access to more than one female.

Smaller males with little or no horns have little chance of beating larger males in altercations and will thus adopt an alternative sneaking strategy, digging a new tunnel that will allow them to intercept the female's tunnel without being noticed by the guarding male. Both of these strategies have proven, thus far, to be reproductively effective for the males practicing them, and adoption of these alternative mating strategies has contributed to the maintenance of a dimorphic male population.[3]

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