Abstract
Sexual ornaments found only in females are a rare occurrence in nature. One explanation for this is that female ornaments are costly to produce and maintain and, therefore, females must trade‐off resources related to reproduction to promote ornament expression. Here, we investigate whether a trade‐off exists between female ornamentation and fecundity in the sex‐role reversed, wide‐bodied pipefish, Stigmatopora nigra. We measured two components of the disk‐shaped, ventral‐striped female ornament, body width, and stripe thickness. After controlling for the influence of body size, we found no evidence of a cost of belly width or stripe thickness on female fecundity. Rather, females that have larger ornaments have higher fecundity and thus accurately advertise their reproductive value to males without incurring a cost to fecundity. We also investigated the relationship between female body size and egg size and found that larger females suffer a slight decrease in egg size and fecundity, although this decrease was independent of female ornamentation. More broadly, considered in light of similar findings in other taxa, lack of an apparent fecundity cost of ornamentation in female pipefish underscores the need to revisit theoretical assumptions concerning the evolution of female ornamentation.
Highlights
In many species, males are the more competitive sex and are adorned with elaborate ornaments that are used as visual signals to attract potential mates (Andersson, 1994)
Male ornaments are thought to arise through sexual selection via female mate choice with more ornamented males favored by choosy females (Andersson, 1994; Hill, 2014)
To investigate the relationship between female ornaments and fitness correlates, we modeled female fecundity and egg size as a function of female size-adjusted ornamentation and snout-vent length (SVL) using linear mixed-effects models fitted in the lme4 package V 1.1-17 in R (Bates, Mächler, Bolker, & Walker, 2015)
Summary
Males are the more competitive sex and are adorned with elaborate ornaments that are used as visual signals to attract potential mates (Andersson, 1994). Male ornaments are thought to arise through sexual selection via female mate choice with more ornamented males favored by choosy females (Andersson, 1994; Hill, 2014) Such preferences are generally ascribed to the high fitness costs of bearing such ornaments (Grafen, 1990; Hill, 2014; Walther & Clayton, 2005; Zahavi, 1975, 1977). This study aimed to investigate the trade-off between female ornamentation and fecundity in the wide body pipefish, Stigmatopora nigra, Kaup 1856 This species is ideal because females possess an exaggerated ornament that females display to males during courtship. We predicted that if there is no fecundity cost to ornament expression, a positive linear relationship between ornament expression and fecundity or egg size should be observed
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