White plumage color as an honest indicator: feather macrostructure links reflectance with reproductive effort and success

Laczi, Miklós and Jablonszky, Mónika and Markó, Gábor and Nagy, Gergely and Szabó, Gyula and Zsebők, Sándor and Török, János and Hegyi, Gergely (2022) White plumage color as an honest indicator: feather macrostructure links reflectance with reproductive effort and success. BEHAVIORAL ECOLOGY AND SOCIOBIOLOGY, 76 (9). No. 125. ISSN 0340-5443

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Abstract

The structural condition of feathers may generally have a decisive role in shaping the color properties of the plumage. However, the information content of structurally mediated color differences is poorly known. This makes it particularly hard to determine the meaning of color variation in pigment-free white plumage patches. The white wing patch of the collared flycatcher (Ficedula albicollis) is an important sexual trait, and changes in its reflectance are partly due to macrostructural condition. We used 2 years of macrostructural, reflectance, and breeding data from both sexes to examine whether wing patch macrostructure lends information content to actual reflectance in terms of reproductive effort and success. Macrostructure strongly predicted actual reflectance in males but only weakly in females. Furthermore, in males, feather vane width was related positively to current year reproductive effort, and negatively to previous year reproductive effort. This indicates that macrostructurally mediated reflectance attributes may inform the receiver not only of actual reproductive capacity but also of individual quality via reproductive costs.

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