Male sexual ornament size is positively associated with reproductive morphology and enhanced fertility in the stalk-eyed fly Teleopsis dalmanni
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Exaggerated male ornaments and displays often evolve in species where males only provide females with ejaculates during reproduction. Although "good genes" arguments are typically invoked to explain this phenomenon, a simpler alternative is possible if variation in male reproductive quality (e.g. sperm number, ejaculate content, mating rate) is an important determinant of female reproductive success. The "phenotype-linked fertility hypothesis" states that female preference for male ornaments or displays has been selected to ensure higher levels of fertility and has driven the evolution of exaggerated male traits. Females of the stalk-eyed fly Teleopsis dalmanni must mate frequently to maintain high levels of fertility and prefer to mate with males exhibiting large eyespan, a condition-dependent sexual ornament. If eyespan indicates male reproductive quality, females could directly increase their reproductive success by mating with males with large eyespan. Here we investigate whether male eyespan indicates accessory gland and testis length, and then ask whether mating with large eyespan males affects female fertility. RESULTS: Male eyespan was a better predictor of two key male reproductive traits--accessory gland and testis length--than was body size alone. This positive relationship held true over three levels of increasing environmental stress during the maturation of the adult accessory glands and testes. Furthermore, females housed with a large eyespan male exhibited higher levels of fertility than those with small eyespan males. CONCLUSION: Male eyespan in stalk-eyed flies is subject to strong directional mate preference and is a reliable indicator of male reproductive quality--both because males with larger eyespan have bigger accessory glands and testes, and also as they confer higher fertility on females. Fertility enhancement may have arisen because males with larger eyespan mated more often and/or because they transferred more sperm or other substances per ejaculate. The need to ensure high levels of fertility could thus have been an important selective force in the coevolution of female preference and male eyespan in stalk-eyed flies. Our results support the phenotype-linked fertility hypothesis and suggest that it might be of general importance in explaining the evolution of exaggerated male ornaments and displays in species where males only provide females with ejaculates during reproduction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".