Digest: Disentangling plumage and behavior contributions to iridescent signals*

Abstract

To what extent do plumage properties and behavior interact to produce visual signals? Simpson and McGraw (2019) propose an elegant and novel experimental set-up to dissociate behavior and color and assess their relative effects in the resulting iridescent signal. They find that modification of either component leads to a modification of the resulting signal as seen by the receiver, suggesting that sexual selection acts simultaneously on both signal components.