IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/beheco/v16y2005i1p89-95.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Elaborate ornaments are costly to maintain: evidence for high maintenance handicaps

Author

Listed:
  • Bruno A. Walther
  • Dale H. Clayton

Abstract

Elaborate secondary sexual traits, such as the ornamental plumage of birds, may be favored by female choice because they serve as honest indicators of male quality. Elaborate traits are thought to be honest signals because they are expensive to produce and increase predation risk. Here we investigate another potential cost of elaborate traits, i.e., the time and energy required to maintain them in good condition. We tested the hypothesis that species of birds with ornamental plumage invest more time in maintenance behavior than do related species without such plumage. To test the hypothesis we quantified the maintenance behavior of nine ornamental and nine non-ornamental species in aviaries and zoos. To test the validity of using captive birds, we first collected data on 12 captive species for which data from wild individuals were also available. The maintenance times of captive and wild individuals were highly correlated across species. Maintenance time was also correlated with plumage length, independent of body size. Ornamental species had longer plumage than non-ornamental species, and they devoted significantly more time to maintenance. Time spent on maintenance cannot be devoted to other activities. This temporal trade-off reinforces the honesty of ornamental plumage. We suggest that high maintenance handicaps are present in a variety of animals. Copyright 2005.

Suggested Citation

  • Bruno A. Walther & Dale H. Clayton, 2005. "Elaborate ornaments are costly to maintain: evidence for high maintenance handicaps," Behavioral Ecology, International Society for Behavioral Ecology, vol. 16(1), pages 89-95, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:beheco:v:16:y:2005:i:1:p:89-95
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/arh135
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sergio Nolazco & Kaspar Delhey & Shinichi Nakagawa & Anne Peters, 2022. "Ornaments are equally informative in male and female birds," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 13(1), pages 1-10, December.
    2. Gregorio Moreno-Rueda & Herbert Hoi, 2012. "Female house sparrows prefer big males with a large white wing bar and fewer feather holes caused by chewing lice," Behavioral Ecology, International Society for Behavioral Ecology, vol. 23(2), pages 271-277.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:beheco:v:16:y:2005:i:1:p:89-95. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/beheco .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.