Laboratory of Theoretical and Applied Ethology, Department of Biology, Federal Rural University of Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil.
Laboratory of Ethology, Department of Zoology, Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil.
Am J Primatol. 2019 Mar;81(3):e22963. doi: 10.1002/ajp.22963. Epub 2019 Feb 26.
Most species of New World primates have an unusual color vision pattern that can affect an individual's ability to detect food. Whereas males can only be dichromatic, females can be either dichromatic or trichromatic. Trichromats are expected to have an advantage in detecting conspicuous food whereas dichromats should be better at locating cryptic resources. Here we aimed to understand how color vision phenotype influences insect foraging by five groups of common marmosets living in a semiarid environment. We recorded insect predation events, noting morphotype and color of the captured insect, and the substrate from which it was captured. Color modeling suggested that, for all values of chromatic contrast resulting from comparing the measured insect-substrate pairs, trichromats outperformed dichromats. Females showed an overall higher insect capture rate than males. Females also showed a higher capture rate of conspicuous insects but there was no sex difference for the capture of cryptic insects. When we compared only dichromatic individuals there was no difference between sexes. These findings suggest that differences found in capture rate related not only to sex but also to visual polymorphism and that the latter is a crucial factor determining insect capture rate in common marmosets. Nevertheless, these results should be interpreted with caution because of the small number (three) of dichromat females and the unknown phenotype of the remaining females. Our results support the balancing selection hypothesis, suggesting that the advantage of one phenotype over the other may depend on environmental circumstances. This hypothesis has recently been considered as the most plausible for the maintenance of visual polymorphism in New World primates.
大多数新世界灵长类动物具有一种不寻常的色觉模式，这可能会影响个体发现食物的能力。而雄性只能是二色视者，雌性则可以是二色视者或三色视者。三色视者有望在检测明显的食物方面具有优势，而二色视者则应该更擅长定位隐蔽的资源。在这里，我们旨在了解五种生活在半干旱环境中的普通狨猴的色觉表型如何影响昆虫觅食。我们记录了昆虫捕食事件，记录了被捕食昆虫的形态和颜色，以及从何处捕获了昆虫。颜色建模表明，对于比较测量的昆虫-基质对所产生的所有颜色对比值，三色视者的表现优于二色视者。雌性的昆虫总捕获率高于雄性。雌性还表现出更高的显眼昆虫捕获率，但对于隐蔽昆虫的捕获率没有性别差异。当我们仅比较二色视者个体时，性别之间没有差异。这些发现表明，捕获率的差异不仅与性别有关，还与视觉多态性有关，后者是决定普通狨猴昆虫捕获率的关键因素。然而，由于只有三名二色视雌性个体，以及其余雌性个体的未知表型，因此这些结果应谨慎解释。我们的研究结果支持平衡选择假说，表明一种表型相对于另一种表型的优势可能取决于环境情况。该假说最近被认为是维持新世界灵长类动物视觉多态性的最合理假说。
