Handicap principle implies emergence of dimorphic ornaments

Species spanning the animal kingdom have evolved extravagant and costly ornaments to attract mating partners. Zahavi's handicap principle offers an elegant explanation for this: ornaments signal individual quality, and must be costly to ensure honest signalling, making mate selection more effic...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inProceedings of the Royal Society. B, Biological sciences Vol. 283; no. 1843; p. 20161970
Main Authors Clifton, Sara M., Braun, Rosemary I., Abrams, Daniel M.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published England The Royal Society 30.11.2016
Subjects
Animals
Competition
Evolution
Female
Handicap Principle
Male
Mating Preference, Animal
Models, Theoretical
Natural Selection
Ornament
Sex Characteristics
Sexual Selection
competition
natural selection
ornament
evolution
handicap principle
sexual selection
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Summary:Species spanning the animal kingdom have evolved extravagant and costly ornaments to attract mating partners. Zahavi's handicap principle offers an elegant explanation for this: ornaments signal individual quality, and must be costly to ensure honest signalling, making mate selection more efficient. Here, we incorporate the assumptions of the handicap principle into a mathematical model and show that they are sufficient to explain the heretofore puzzling observation of bimodally distributed ornament sizes in a variety of species.
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Electronic supplementary material is available online at https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.3575198.
ISSN:0962-8452
1471-2954
DOI:10.1098/rspb.2016.1970