Sexual Selection and Evolutionary Fitness

The field of sexual selection and evolutionary fitness is characterized by the communication between rivals or potential mates, often accomplished with elaborate ornaments or displays. These forms of communication, widespread across disparate clades, are believed to provide reliable information about the signaler’s condition or quality due to the prohibitive cost of exaggeration. However, empirical studies on the costs of ornaments have yielded equivocal to contradictory results, leaving the costs of ornamentation as a major unresolved question in sexual selection research. This has led some researchers to question some of the fundamental principles of the field. Recently, a whole-organism perspective has been adopted, considering that selection does not act on ornaments in isolation but jointly operates on all aspects of morphology, physiology, behavior, and performance across multiple components of fitness. This perspective suggests that the missing costs of ornamentation can be resolved by accounting for the evolution of “compensatory traits” that ameliorate the costs.

The goal of this research topic is to bring together research that addresses and sheds light on the evolution of compensatory traits and the difficulty of documenting costs of ornaments. It aims to explore the interaction between sexual selection and natural selection on the whole organism, integrating across many of the most novel and exciting areas of research into compensation and the missing costs of ornamentation. This includes areas such as locomotion, foraging performance, sensory ecology, climatic tolerances, and immune defense.

To gather further insights into the evolution of compensatory traits and the costs of ornamentation, we welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:
- The role of compensatory traits in sexual selection and evolutionary fitness.
- The interaction between sexual selection and natural selection on the whole organism.
- The use of both classic and cutting-edge approaches in studying the evolution of compensatory traits, such as comparative methods, phenotypic manipulations, experimental evolution, field studies, and citizen-science observations.
- The impact of various factors on the evolution of compensatory traits, including locomotion, foraging performance, sensory ecology, climatic tolerances and immune defense.