Empirical analysis reveals that direct benefits from males enhance female ornamentation, suggesting cost-offsetting in reproduction.
It has been proposed that female ornaments are less likely to evolve because females face a steeper trade-off between offspring production and ornamentation than males. In their study, Pärssinen et al. (2025) show that direct benefits provided by males during reproduction are associated with the presence of female ornamentation in dance flies, probably because such benefits allow females to offset the costs that may arise from producing these traits.
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David López‐Idiáquez (2025) studied this question.
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