Meeting Abstract
Understanding an animal’s behavior, ecology, and evolution requires knowing their sensory capabilities. Notably, animal perception can vary not only between species, but also within a species. Here we suggest that male and female band-winged grasshoppers (subfamily Oedipodinae) differ in their visual acuity (spatial vision). We examined three species of band-winged grasshopper that show sexual size dimorphisms. Using the Radius of Curvature Estimation, we measured the visual acuity of the region of the eye with the finest spatial vision (total n = 98). Two species showed significant differences in visual acuity between the sexes, while the third was trending towards significance. Generally the females were both larger than their male counterparts and showed finer visual acuity. Our results show that studies correlating spatial vision to body size across animal species may also apply within a species, and suggests that sex differences in visual acuity may be an underappreciated phenomenon leading to behavioral differences between the sexes.
