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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The discrimination of alternative male morphologies

Joseph L. TomkinsJanne S. Kotiaho

subject

Evolutionary biologyAnimal Science and ZoologyBiologyEcology Evolution Behavior and SystematicsEvolutionary theory

description

Male dimorphisms represent alternative selective regimes within a sex. As such, they can be used as a powerful tool in testing evolutionary theory. However, to realize this potential, we need to be able to accurately discriminate individuals into two separate morphs. In this article we discuss the existing methods and propose a new one. We test our method with data from three dimorphic species and compare these results to results with existing methods. We conclude that existing methods often misclassify a large proportion of individuals, but applying our method notably reduces these errors.

https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/12.5.553