0000000000952044
AUTHOR
Rauno Veli Alatalo
Color Signals in the Black Grouse (Tetrao tetrix): Signal Properties and Their Condition Dependency
Recent progress in techniques of quantifying betweenindividual differences of color-based ornaments has revealed undiscovered possibilities for research in sexual selection. We present how the color spectra data can be comprehensively used for studying the importance of sexual ornaments in the black grouse and how these ornaments are related to a male condition. For this, we used both correlative field and experimental data. Field data indicated that older males had more chromatic coloration than yearlings. Blue chroma of males was correlated with male mating success. We experimentally manipulated yearling birds with testosterone implants and found that testosterone-implanted males had impa…
Fluctuating asymmetry and sexual performance in the drumming wolf spider Hygrolycosa rubrofasciata
Recently, there has been much interest in estimating fluctuating asymmetry (FA) of morphological traits as a short-cut measure of individual quality. FA deals with small differences around the symmetry value of zero. Thus, measurement error is often relatively large. However, repeated measurements. and large sample sizes allow reliable estimates of FA that can be corrected for errors. The purpose of this study was two-fold: at the biological level, we examined with a large sample size (N = 804) whether pedipalp FA could be used as a short-cut measure, of individual quality in the wolf spider Hygrolycosa rubrofasciata. This was done by estimating how strongly FA correlates with male sexual p…