Effects of food and thermal regimes on body condition indices and skin colouration in corn snakes

Abstract

AbstractOne of the open problems in evolutionary ecology is signal reliability. While the view that signals need to be costly to be honest has attracted most attention, this type of signals may apply only to some contexts. Also, different views exist about the nature of costs involved in signal honesty, and the classification and examination of these costs remains controversial. Pigmentarybased colouration of animal integuments has received considerable attention among researchers seeking to explain what maintains the honesty of visual signals, but support for existing hypotheses is far from conclusive. Here we use a whole-animal approach and consider a distinct time scale, the period of juvenile growth, to test the effects of different feeding and thermal regimes on different physical parameters and skin colouration in corn snakes