Unraveling the Effects of Selection on Correlated Traits

摘要：女性在选择伴侣时往往会考虑男性身上的显著特征。对各种分类群的研究表明，雌性在评估配偶时，会注意声音、视觉或化学线索。尽管男性可以拥有影响其对女性吸引力的一系列特征，但大多数研究都是考察女性对单一特征的偏好。这留下了一个悬而未决的问题，即女性的偏好在维持一系列特征方面发挥了什么作用。女性的偏好是否决定了男性特征的相关程度？ ？或者，另一种情况是，女性是否更喜欢一种或几种男性特征，而由此产生的一系列特征是由于各种因素限制了男性特征的存在？例如，如果女性在不考虑整体体重的情况下更喜欢较长的男性，这种偏好将导致她们优先与较长较重的男性交配，因为身体长度和体重通常是相关的。很难确定女性在视觉领域对多种特征的偏好，因为还没有技术可以轻松地将一个男性的特征动画化或变形到另一个男性身上。我们将利用最新的视频技术，使我们能够确定雌性偏好在解释三种剑尾鱼的雄性身体性别、剑长和复杂求爱行为的相关程度方面的作用。这些研究有望为两性如何以及为什么存在差异这一普遍问题提供见解

ABSTRACT PI: Ryan PROPOSAL NUMBER: 9641522 Females often base their choice of mates on conspicuous traits borne by males. Studies in a variety of taxa show that females attend to acoustic, visual, or chemical cues when evaluating mates. Although males can possess suites of traits that influence their attractiveness to females, most studies, however, examine female preferences for single traits. This leaves unresolved the issue as to what role female preferences play in maintaining suites of traits. Do female s exert preferences that determine the extent to which male traits are correlated? Or, alternatively, do females prefer a single or perhaps a few male traits, and the resultant constellation of traits is due to various factors that constrain the presence of male traits? For example, if female were to prefer longer males with no attention to overall body mass, this preference would result in them mating preferentially with longer and heavier males since body length and body mass are usually correlated. It has been difficult to ascertain female preferences for multiple traits in the visual domain because technology has not been available to easily animate and morph traits from one male onto another. We will utilize recent advances in video technology that will allow us to determine the role of female preferences in explaining the degree of correlation of male body sexes, sword length, and complex courtship behavior in three species of swordtail fishes. These studies promise to provide insights into the general question as to how and why the sexes differ as they do