Behavior and Ethology Commons^™

The Effect Of Female Ornamentation On Aggressive Male-Male Interactions In The Striped Plateau Lizard (Sceloporus Virgatus), Matt E. Dubin

Summer Research

Theoretical and empirical studies have shown that the intensity of male-male competition is greatly influenced by the quality of the contested resource. To date few studies have focused on whether the quality of a contested female will have the same effect. Within a number of species, the quality of the female may be signaled with sexually selected female ornamentation. In the striped plateau lizard (Sceloporus virgatus), females develop ornamental orange throat patches before ovulation, and previous research has shown that females with larger ornaments are of higher phenotypic quality and also produce offspring with higher phenotypic quality, while …