Visual Background Choice and Light Environment Affect Male Guppy Visual Contrast.

ABSTRACT: Male guppies (Poecilia reticulata) have multiple colored spots and perform courtship displays near the edges of streams in Trinidad in shallow water flowing through rainforest. Depending upon the orientation of the pair, the female sees the male displays against gravel or other stream bed substrates or against the spacelight-the roughly uniform light coming from the water column away from the bank. We observed courting pairs in two adjacent natural streams and noted the directions of each male display. We found that the female sees the male more often against spacelight than against gravel when females either faced the spacelight from the opposite bank or from downstream, or both. Visual modelling using natural substrate reflectances and field light measurements showed higher chroma

SUBMITTER: Endler JA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9500966 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature