Hot off the press!
After a long slog, my colleague Claudia Buser (now in New Zealand) and I (along with our late supervisor from Zurich, Paul Ward) have gone to press at Functional Ecology with her (I think I am allowed to say so) excellent work on maternal plasticity in yellow dung flies.
As yet non-copy-edited pdf here.
This photo (by an old mate from Zurich, Roland Gautier) shows yellow males perched above ovipositing olive-coloured females on a dung pat. We experimentally studied whether female perceptions of the conditions their larvae would encounter affected larval fitness. I won’t spoil the punchline, but females are very clever, obviously. Nevertheless, we found no evidence that they are doing anything funny via sperm choice….
Posted on September 30, 2013, in Publications and tagged direct benefits, female choice, Functional Ecology, maternal care, phenotypic plasticity, Scathophaga stercoraria, sexual selection, sperm choice, yellow dung fly. Bookmark the permalink. Leave a comment.
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