Ornament Complexity Is Correlated with Sexual Selection (A Comment on Raia et al., "Cope's Rule and the Universal Scaling Law of Ornament Complexity")

Holman, Luke and Bro-Jorgensen, Jakob ORCID: 0000-0003-2899-8477 (2016) Ornament Complexity Is Correlated with Sexual Selection (A Comment on Raia et al., "Cope's Rule and the Universal Scaling Law of Ornament Complexity"). AMERICAN NATURALIST, 188 (2). pp. 272-275.

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/687251

Abstract

Raia et al. propose that the evolution of the shape and complexity of animal ornaments (e.g., deer antlers) can be explained by interspecific variation in body size and is not influenced by sexual selection. They claim to show that ornament complexity is related to body size by an 0.25-power law and argue that this finding precludes a role for sexual selection in the evolution of ornament complexity. However, their study does not test alternative hypotheses and mismeasures antler shape allometry by omitting much of the published data. We show that an index of sexual selection (sexual size dimorphism) is positively correlated with size-corrected antler complexity and that the allometric slope of complexity is substantially greater than 0.25, contra Raia et al. We conclude that sexual selection and physical constraints both affect the evolution of antler shape.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	allometry, antlers, Cope's rule, deer, morphology, weapons
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	22 Jul 2016 15:44
Last Modified:	19 Jan 2023 07:33
DOI:	10.1086/687251
Related URLs:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3002485