Digest: Disentangling plumage and behavior contributions to iridescent signals

Hugo Gruson (1)

1 CEFE - Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive

To what extent do plumage properties and behavior interact to produce visual signals? Simpson and McGraw (2018) 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.

Mots clés: coloration; courtship; bee hummingbirds; shuttle display; angle‐dependent structural plumage

Domaines: Biodiversité et Ecologie; Evolution [q-bio.PE]; Systématique, phylogénie et taxonomie; Interactions entre organismes; Biophysique [physics.bio-ph]; Optique [physics.optics]

Hugo Gruson. Digest: Disentangling plumage and behavior contributions to iridescent signals. Evolution - International Journal of Organic Evolution, 2019, 73 (3), pp.623-625. ⟨10.1111/evo.13685⟩. ⟨hal-01987390⟩