In Reply: Male Firefly Mimicry

Male Firefly

might allow sister-sister discrimination. The locations of the cues used in discrimination are not known. Egg-stage switches indicated that eggs or the comb, or their combination, are adequate for discrimination of a sister's comb from a nonsister's. For several reasons (7) we suspect that discrimination cues reside in the comb, not in brood members themselves, and are odors applied by the foun...

Density-dependent male mating harassment, female resistance, and male mimicry.

Genetic variation in female resistance and tolerance to male mating harassment can affect the outcome of sexually antagonistic mating interactions. We investigated female mating rates and male mating harassment in natural populations of a damselfly (Ischnura elegans). This damselfly species has a heritable sex-limited polymorphism in females, where one of the morphs is a male mimic (androchrome...

Vocal mimicry in male bowerbirds: who learns from whom?

Vocal mimicry is one of the more striking aspects of avian vocalization and is widespread across songbirds. However, little is known about how mimics acquire heterospecific and environmental sounds. We investigated geographical and individual variation in the mimetic repertoires of males of a proficient mimic, the spotted bowerbird Ptilonorhynchus maculatus. Male bower owners shared more of the...

Reply to Peltz et al : Post - translational stabilization of the firefly luciferase

The IC50 of an inhibitor varies depending on assay conditions such as substrate concentration (1), as depicted for PTC124 in Fig. 1 A of Peltz et al.’s letter (2). Steady-Glo and BrightGlo differ in luciferase substrate composition, making comparison of inhibitor potency using these commercial formulations meaningless and inconsequential to inhibitor-based stabilization of the reporter occurrin...

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