Across all three morphs, the number of realized matings was significantly and positively related to the number of male clasping attempts (Fig 3: F1,266 = 19.637, P<0.001).
For all traits measured, the treatment by wing morph interactions were not significant, indicating that the effect of wing morph on the number of copulations and male attractiveness was consistent across the experimental populations of both diet quality treatments.
Based on sexual conflict theory, we expected to find differences between the morphs in the number of matings received, their ability to reject male mating attempts and the fecundity-consequences of both mating attempts and realized matings.
In all studied North American and Eurasian lakes, such sympatric morphs differ in the number of gill rakers, a highly heritable trait related to trophic utilization.
Morphs differed in the number of aggressive behaviours received (Kruskal-Wallis test: H4, 260: 35. 09, P < 0.01) and initiated (Kruskal-Wallis test: H4, 260: 56. 74, P < 0.01; Figure 2b) during the open aquaria experiment.
Only single, solitary and mature females were used, and colour morph frequencies were estimated from the number of each morph divided by the total number of females.
To estimate morph frequency, we recorded the number of males and the two female morphs found within 1 m on both sides of the line.
As in our previous study [ 28], we recorded for each prey colour morph and visual background, the number of presented prey images that were detected (correct), time to detection, the number of times that a participant failed to detect the image within 60 seconds (wrong), and the number of times the participant clicked somewhere on the screen where there was no grasshopper image (wrong).
Morph frequencies were estimated as the number of each mature female morph divided by the total number of mature females (Table 1).
Thus, the number of morphing steps must be optimized so that structural variations that lead to a change in a synthetic accessibility are captured just after they appear.
