Female mating preferences and male coloration covary with water transparency in a Lake Victoria cichlid fish

By M. Maan, Ole Seehausen, J. V. Alphen. 2010

98 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Rapid speciation in Lake Victoria cichlid fish of the genus Pundamilia may be facilitated by sexual selection: female mate choice exerts sexual selection on male nuptial coloration within species and maintains reproductive isolation between species. However, declining water transparency coincides with increasingly dull coloration and increasing hybridization. In the present study, we investigated the mechanism underlying this pattern in Pundamilia nyererei, a species that interbreeds with a sister species in turbid but not in clear water. We compared measures of intraspecific sexual selection between two populations from locations that differ in water transparency. First, in laboratory mate-choice experiments, conducted in clear water and under broad-spectrum illumination, we found that females originating from turbid water have significantly weaker preferences for male coloration than females originating from clear water. Second, both the hue and body coverage of male coloration differ between populations, which is consistent with adaptation to different photic habitats. These findings suggest that the observed relationship between male coloration and water transparency is not mediated by environmental variation alone. Rather, female mating preferences are indicated to have changed in response to this variation, constituting the first evidence for intraspecific preference-trait co-evolution in cichlid fish. (C) 2010 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2010, 99, 398-406.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/886a9071f524aba545b428db955bf1b6651b6f8c

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In Ecology

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

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Citations in the corpus

Communication in troubled waters: responses of fish communication systems to changing environments (2011, background): “…fish from Lake Victoria, the severity of eutrophication is negatively associated with the intensity of male colour, the strength of colour-mediated sexual selection, and the number of coexisting colour morphs and species (Seehausen et al. 1997; Seehausen et al. 2008; Maan et al. 2010, see Fig.”
Behavioural responses to human‐induced environmental change (2011, background): “As a result, the mechanism maintaining reproductive isolation in the lake is not working properly and the diversity of fishes is threatened (Seehausen et al., 1997; Maan et al., 2010).”