Indicators of physiological stress and the elaboration of sexual traits in the collared flycatcher

László Zsolt Garamszegi, Santiago Merino, János Török, Marcel Eens and Javier Martínez

Behavioral Ecology, 2006, vol. 17, issue 3, 399-404

Abstract: Stress may have consequences for the evolution of condition-dependent sexual traits. For example, stress may be related to sexual traits through immune function, and sexual traits can reflect how individuals bear the costs of stress-mediated immunosuppression. However, male traits may be directly associated with stress, and such traits would then indicate stress tolerance. Here, we present initial results for the relationship between physiological stress estimated by the levels of heat shock proteins (HSP60 and HSP70) and heterophil/lymphocyte ratio and the elaboration of sexual traits, such as forehead and wing patch size and song features in the collared flycatcher Ficedula albicollis. Males producing longer and more versatile songs had significantly higher levels of HSP70, but other traits were unrelated to stress. In general, effect sizes for the relationship between stress and sexual traits had broad confidence intervals and varied between being small and medium effects. Immunoglobulin levels, leukocyte abundance, haemoparasite prevalence, male age, and date and time effects did not affect the relationship between stress and sexual traits. These preliminary results, serving a basis for further experimental studies indicate that the relationship between sexual traits and stress does not seem to be strong, but stress may partially constrain the expression of some sexual traits. Copyright 2006.

Keywords: bird song; blood parasites; collared flycatcher; heat shock proteins; immunity; sexual selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/arj042 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:beheco:v:17:y:2006:i:3:p:399-404

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Behavioral Ecology is currently edited by Louise Barrett

More articles in Behavioral Ecology from International Society for Behavioral Ecology Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().