IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0091725.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Relative Effectiveness of Signaling Systems: Relying on External Items Reduces Signaling Accuracy while Leks Increase Accuracy

Author

Listed:
  • Gavin M Leighton

Abstract

Multiple evolutionary phenomena require individual animals to assess conspecifics based on behaviors, morphology, or both. Both behavior and morphology can provide information about individuals and are often used as signals to convey information about quality, motivation, or energetic output. In certain cases, conspecific receivers of this information must rank these signaling individuals based on specific traits. The efficacy of information transfer associated within a signal is likely related to the type of trait used to signal, though few studies have investigated the relative effectiveness of contrasting signaling systems. I present a set of models that represent a large portion of signaling systems and compare them in terms of the ability of receivers to rank signalers accurately. Receivers more accurately assess signalers if the signalers use traits that do not require non-food resources; similarly, receivers more accurately ranked signalers if all the signalers could be observed simultaneously, similar to leks. Surprisingly, I also found that receivers are only slightly better at ranking signaler effort if the effort results in a cumulative structure. This series of findings suggests that receivers may attend to specific traits because the traits provide more information relative to others; and similarly, these results may explain the preponderance of morphological and behavioral display signals.

Suggested Citation

  • Gavin M Leighton, 2014. "The Relative Effectiveness of Signaling Systems: Relying on External Items Reduces Signaling Accuracy while Leks Increase Accuracy," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 9(3), pages 1-9, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0091725
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0091725
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0091725
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0091725&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0091725?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:plo:pone00:0091725. 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: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    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.