Who is the Fairest of Them All: A Comparison Study of Male Guppy Color Preferences in Pink and Blue Female Models?

Abstract

Guppies (Poecilia reticulata) have been used to study the sexual selection in aquatic fish. P. reticulata are used in particular as the research animal of interest because of their easy care, small size, well-identified behaviors, variable morphology, and the excellent early work describing their behavior and ecology (French 2016). Sexual selection is defined as the success rate of individuals within a population that are successful in mating (Panuis et al. 2001). We wanted to study whether coloration effects the mating choice in male guppies. For our experiment, we hypothesized that the neon pink fish model would attract the male guppy more than the dark sparkly blue model because pink is a brighter color. We believe that this is a valid hypothesis because there are very few studies that test the male preferences in female guppies, however, there are many studies that tests the female preferences in male guppies. We implemented our experiment by running ten trials that were five minutes long with five minute resting periods. To collect our data, we used a guppy data collection application that was on the desktop that recorded the time spent in each zone and allowed us to count different courtship behaviors that we observed. Our results presented that our hypothesis was unsupported, since according to the Wilcoxon test, our results proved not to be significant.