Conspicuous Female Ornamentation and Tests of Male Mate Preference in Threespine Sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus)

Conspicuous Female Ornamentation and Tests of Male Mate Preference in Threespine Sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus)

Sexual selection drives the evolution of exaggerated male ornaments in many animal species. Female ornamentation is now acknowledged also to be common but is generally less well understood. One example is the recently documented red female throat coloration in some threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) populations. Although female sticklebacks often exhibit a preference for red male t...

Sequencing the genome of threespine sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus)

Character displacement of male nuptial colour in threespine sticklebacks ( Gasterosteus aculeatus )

Character displacement in signalling traits occurs when differences between species are greater in sympatry than where either species occurs alone. Finding character displacement in a signalling trait suggests that the trait has diverged as a result of interspecific interactions such as competition, aggression, predation, or reproductive interference. We tested for character displacement of mal...

The dynamics of color signals in male threespine sticklebacks Gasterosteus aculeatus

Body coloration and color patterns are ubiquitous throughout the animal kingdom and vary between and within species. Recent studies have dealt with individual dynamics of various aspects of coloration, as it is in many cases a flexible trait and changes in color expression may be context-dependent. During the reproductive phase, temporal changes of coloration in the visible spectral range (400-...

Nonlinear effects of female mate choice in wild threespine sticklebacks.

Sexual selection by mate choice represents a very important selective pressure in many animal species and might have evolutionary impacts beyond exaggeration of secondary sexual traits. Describing the shape and strength of the relationships linking mating success and nonsexual traits in natural conditions represents a challenging step in our understanding of adaptive evolution. We studied the e...