Meeting Abstract
Male eastern fence lizards display conspicuous ventral blue badges with important functions in courtship and agonistic interactions. These same badges can be found on females, albeit never as dramatic as seen in males, and with significant variability in intensity. Previous research has shown that females bearing blue badges are disfavored as mates, but have performance advantages that could counterbalance their reproductive costs. Currently, we are interested in the relationship between the degree of maternal ornamentation and the fitness of offspring. We first determined a color metric that was insensitive to temperature (which affects badge coloration in this species). Using this metric, we found that offspring of females bearing more saturated badges exhibited reduced mass gain since hatching and were less likely to survive to maturity. These results add to the series of documented evolutionary costs faced by females bearing traits that are typical of males, highlighting the importance of future investigation on potential benefits associated with this trait. The mechanisms behind badge development and associated costs and benefits are the subject of our future work, where we will quantify levels of different sex hormones in these females and throughout different life stages of their offspring. With this, we hope to further study the potential connection between physiology, color, and other fitness-relevant traits such as immune response, performance and mating success, factors that could be responsible for the maintenance of male-typical ornamentation in females.
