Sponsored Projects for Undergraduate Research

Sexual selection gives rise to some of the most spectacular behaviors and morphologies seen in animals. Among them, some have evolved weaponary to compete for access to mates, while others have evolved elaborate colors and songs to entice potential mates. However, despite the generality of sexual selection, animals that perform extremely complex displays are rarely studied and instead research has focused on animals with simple displays. Thus studying how and why animals  with complex displays have evolved is key to understanding sexual selection in general.

 Habronattus jumping spider males have colorful ornamentation and court females with complex visual and vibratory displays. Several hypothesis have been proposed to explain the adaptive value of complexity, including fine-scale species recognition. However, mating trials of different Habronattus species with different ornamentation and displays suggests that courtship and mating occur indiscriminatively. The current project aims to disentangle the potential reason for this using mating trials to answer (i) What aspects of male courtship is prefered by females and (ii) is the preference of the female same or different across conspecific and heterospecific mating trials. The result of this study will allow us to understand how complex signals may play a role in hybrid speciation or how complex signals can diversify in the face of gene flow.