Who cares? Experimental attention biases provide new insights into a mammalian sexual signal

Constance Dubuc, William L. Allen, Julie Cascio, D. Susie Lee, Dario Maestripieri, Megan Petersdorf, Sandra Winters and James P. Higham

Behavioral Ecology, 2016, vol. 27, issue 1, 68-74

Abstract: The effects of intrasexual and intersexual selection on male trait evolution can be difficult to disentangle, especially based on observational data. Male–male competition can limit an observer’s ability to identify the effect of female mate choice independently from sexual coercion. Here, we use an experimental approach to explore whether an ornament, the red facial skin exhibited by male rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta), might be involved in both female mate choice and male–male competition. We used a noninvasive experimental approach based on the looking time paradigm in a free-ranging setting, showing images of differently colored male faces to both adult females (N = 91) and males (N = 77), as well as to juveniles (N = 94) as a control. Results show that both adult females and males looked longer at dark red faces compared with pale pink ones. However, when considering the proportion of subjects that looked longer at dark red faces regardless of preference strength, only females showed a significant dark red bias. In contrast, juveniles did not show any preferences between stimuli, suggesting that the adult bias is not a consequence of the experimental design or related to a general sensory bias for red coloration among all age–sex classes. Collectively, these results support the role the ornament plays in female mate choice in this species and provide the first evidence that this ornament may play a role in male–male competition as well, despite a general lack of observational evidence for the latter effect to date.

Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/arv117 (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:27:y:2016:i:1:p:68-74.

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 ().