Search

Colourful plumage is typical of males in species with conventional sex roles, in which females care for offspring and males compete for females, as well as in many monogamous species in which both sexes care for offspring. Reversed sexual dichromatism—more colourful females than males—is predominant in species with sex role reversal. In the latter species, males care for offspring and females compete for mates, the mating system is mainly polyandrous and there is reversed size dimorphism—females are larger than males. Here, we document a case of reversed dichromatism, in the greater flamingo Phoenicopterus roseus, in which there is no sex role reversal and no reversed size dimorphism. Although theoretical models postulate that cases of reversed dichromatism should be rare among monogamous ornamented birds, our findings show that the use of cosmetics might be a mechanism for the occurrence of more ornamented females than males. Indeed, the concentrations of carotenoids in the uropygial secretions used as make-up were higher in females than in males. Apparently, there was a trade-off between coloration and antioxidant defence, as the concentrations of carotenoids in the uropygial secretions were lower during chick provisioning than in other periods, contrary to those in plasma. In this system, the application of make-up would act as a dynamic signal, which would allow a rapid reallocation of resources used for signalling among functions depending on needs. Cases like this may have evolved to signal the ability to provide parental care when females are more physiologically stressed than males.

When males become more ornamented and reproduce more successfully as they grow older, phenotypic correlations between ornament exaggeration and reproductive success can be confounded with age effects in cross-sectional studies, and thus say relatively little about sexual selection on these traits. This is exemplified here in a correlative study of male fertilization success in a large colony of American barn swallows (Hirundo rustica erythrogaster). Previous studies of this species have indicated that two sexually dimorphic traits, tail length and ventral plumage coloration, are positively correlated with male fertilization success, and a mechanism of sexual selection by female choice has been invoked. However, these studies did not control for potential age-related variation in trait expression. Here, we show that male fertilization success was positively correlated with male tail length but not with plumage coloration. We also show that 1-year-old males had shorter tails and lower fertilization success than older males. This age effect accounted for much of the covariance between tail length and fertilization success. Still, there was a positive relationship between tail length and fertilization success among older males. But as this group consisted of males from different age classes, an age effect may be hidden in this relationship as well. Our data also revealed a longitudinal increase in both tail length and fertilization success for individual males. We argue that age-dependent ornament expression and reproductive performance in males complicate inferences about female preferences and sexual selection.