Abstract

Many sexually selected ornaments and weapons are elaborations of an animal’s outer body surface, including long feathers, colorful skin, and rigid outgrowths. The time and energy required to keep these traits clean, attractive, and in good condition for signaling may represent an important but understudied cost of bearing a sexually selected trait. Male fiddler crabs possess an enlarged and brightly colored claw that is used both as a weapon to fight with rival males and also as an ornament to court females. Here, we demonstrate that males benefit from grooming because females prefer males with clean claws over dirty claws but also that the time spent grooming detracts from the amount of time available for courting females. Males, therefore, face a temporal trade-off between attracting the attention of females and maintaining a clean claw. Our study provides rare evidence of the importance of grooming for mediating sexual interactions in an invertebrate, indicating that sexual selection has likely shaped the evolution of self-maintenance behaviors across a broad range of taxa.

中文翻译：

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精细特征的成本：在吸引女性和保持整洁的装饰品之间进行权衡

摘要

许多经过性选择的装饰品和武器都是对动物体外表面的精心装饰，包括长羽毛，五颜六色的皮肤和僵硬的植物。保持这些性状清洁，有吸引力并处于良好状态以发出信号所需的时间和精力可能代表了一项带有性选择特征的重要但未被充分研究的成本。公提琴蟹拥有一个扩大的，色彩鲜艳的爪子，既可以用作与敌对雄性交战的武器，又可以作为向雌性雌性发饰的装饰品。在这里，我们证明了男性从修饰中受益，因为女性更喜欢干净的爪子而不是肮脏的爪子，而且​​修饰时间花费的时间也少于女性的求婚时间。因此，雄性在吸引雌性的注意力和保持干净的爪子之间面临暂时的权衡。