Journal
ANNUAL REVIEW OF ECOLOGY EVOLUTION AND SYSTEMATICS
Volume 39, Issue -, Pages 387-413Publisher
ANNUAL REVIEWS
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.ecolsys.39.110707.173502
Keywords
animal diversity; sexual selection; male competition; horns; antlers; tusks
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation [IOS-0642409]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Males in many species invest substantially in structures that are used in combat with rivals over access to females. These weapons can attain extreme proportions and have diversified in form repeatedly I review empirical literature oil the function and evolution of sexually selected weapons to clarify important unanswered questions for future research. Despite their many shapes and sizes, and the multitude of habitats within which they function, animal weapons share many properties: They evolve when males are able to defend spatially restricted critical resources, they are typically the most variable morphological structures of these species, and this variation honestly reflects among-individual differences in body size or quality. What is not clear is how, or why, these weapons diverge in form. The potential for male competition to drive rapid divergence in weapon morphology remains one of the most exciting and understudied topics in sexual selection research today.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available