Female platys prefer long tails

Haines, Sarah; Gould, James L.

doi:10.1038/370512a0

Cited by 51 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Sci. USA 95 (1998)or with long tails (24). These results suggest that females should prefer males with a full sword (intact) to males with shorter swords (partial sword and no sword).…”

Section: Evolution: Rosenthal and Evansmentioning

confidence: 79%

Female preference for swords in Xiphophorus helleri reflects a bias for large apparent size

Rosenthal

Evans

1998

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

235

196

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Swordtail fish (Poeciliidae: genus Xiphophorus) are a paradigmatic case of sexual selection by sensory exploitation. Female preference for males with a conspicuous ''sword'' ornament is ancestral, suggesting that male morphology has evolved in response to a preexisting bias. The perceptual mechanisms underlying female mate choice have not been identified, complicating efforts to understand the selection pressures acting on ornament design. We consider two alternative models of receiver behavior, each consistent with previous results. Females could respond either to specific characteristics of the sword or to more general cues, such as the apparent size of potential mates. We showed female swordtails a series of computer-altered video sequences depicting a courting male. Footage of an intact male was preferred strongly to otherwise identical sequences in which portions of the sword had been deleted selectively, but a disembodied courting sword was less attractive than an intact male. There was no difference between responses to an isolated sword and to a swordless male of comparable length, or between an isolated sword and a homogenous background. Female preference for a sworded male was abolished by enlarging the image of a swordless male to compensate for the reduction in length caused by removing the ornament. This pattern of results is consistent with mate choice being mediated by a general preference for large males rather than by specific characters. Similar processes may account for the evolution of exaggerated traits in other systems.

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“…Sci. USA 95 (1998)or with long tails (24). These results suggest that females should prefer males with a full sword (intact) to males with shorter swords (partial sword and no sword).…”

Section: Evolution: Rosenthal and Evansmentioning

confidence: 79%

Female preference for swords in Xiphophorus helleri reflects a bias for large apparent size

Rosenthal

Evans

1998

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

235

196

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“…Once the female is closer to the male, visual cues become important. There is some evidence for intraspecific mate discrimination on the basis of body size/ presence of courtship (X. nigrensis: Ryan and Wagner 1987) and the length of either the caudal sword (X. helleri : Basolo 1990a,b) or the caudal fin (X. variatus: Halnes and Gould 1994). Xiphophorus montezumae males are the largest and have the longest sword length/standard length index of all the northern swordtails (Rauchenberger et al 1990).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interspecific Recognition and Discrimination Based Upon Olfactory Cues in Northern Swordtails

McLennan

Ryan

1999

Evolution

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Female Xiphophorus montezumae were attracted to olfactory cues from conspecific and heterospecific (X. cortezi and X. nigrensis) males when given a choice between the stimulus and water. When given a choice between conspecific and heterospecific cues, females only demonstrated a strong preference for the conspecific stimulus when it was matched against X. nigrensis. Female X. nigrensis were attracted to olfactory cues from their close relative, X. cortezi, but did not respond to cues from the more distantly related X. montezumae. They preferred the scent of their own males to the olfactory cues of both heterospecific species. Our results indicate that X. cortezi and X. nigrensis share an apomorphic change in some aspect of their olfactory cue-receiver system that is not shared with X. montezumae. We also uncovered an asymmetry in response based on olfactory stimuli in these fishes: X. montezumae is moderately attracted to the cue from X. nigrensis, whereas X. nigrensis does not respond to the cue from X. montezumae at all.

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“…First, behavioral experiments with numerous poeciliids (Ryan and Wagner 1987;Haines and Gould 1994;Schlupp et al 1994;Morris et al 1996;Rosenthal and Evans 1998;Gould et al 1999;Bisazza et al 2001;MacLaren et al 2004;MacLaren 2006;MacLaren and Rowland 2006a) suggest preference for larger male apparent size may be a general tendency in this family. Secondly, males of most poeciliids that court also possess sexually dimorphic fin extensions (Farr 1989) (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Female preference for male lateral projection area in Poecilia reticulata

MacLaren

Fontaine

2011

Environ Biol Fish

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The lateral projection area (LPA) hypothesis was investigated by presenting female guppies, Poecilia reticulata with a series of paired males in three experiments. One trait was held constant in each experiment (dorsal fin size in expt I, body size in expt II, and total LPA in expt III) while body: dorsal fin ratio varied. Females spent more time near dummies of greater body and dorsal fin size in experiments I and II. The preference functions based on the first two sets of stimuli showed a similar pattern: the greater the LPA difference between paired dummies, the stronger the preference for the larger of the two. However, in the third experiment, neither fin size, body size, nor any particular dorsal fin+body size combination was preferred. These findings support the LPA hypothesis suggesting that increased LPA is more stimulating to sexually receptive females, and that females consequently prefer larger males. Preference for increased male dorsal fin size/LPA in both P. latipinna and P. mexicana as demonstrated in previous studies, and the more distantly related P. reticulata (shown here) is consistent with common ancestry of the sensory/ neural systems in females of all three species and perhaps the entire Poeciliid family.

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Female platys prefer long tails

Cited by 51 publications

References 3 publications

Female preference for swords in Xiphophorus helleri reflects a bias for large apparent size

Female preference for swords in Xiphophorus helleri reflects a bias for large apparent size

Interspecific Recognition and Discrimination Based Upon Olfactory Cues in Northern Swordtails

Female preference for male lateral projection area in Poecilia reticulata

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