Female ornaments: is red skin color attractive to males and related to condition in rhesus macaques?

ABSTRACT: Sexual selection produces extravagant male traits, such as colorful ornaments, via female mate choice. More rarely, in mating systems in which males allocate mating effort between multiple females, female ornaments may evolve via male mate choice. Females of many anthropoid primates exhibit ornaments that indicate intraindividual cyclical fertility, but which have also been proposed to function as interindividual quality signals. Rhesus macaque females are one such species, exhibiting cyclical facial color variation that indicates ovulatory status, but in which the function of interindividual variation is unknown. We collected digital images of the faces of 32 rhesus macaque adult females. We assessed mating rates, and consortship by males, according to female face coloration. We also asse

SUBMITTER: Higham JP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7995641 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Mar-Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature