Sex, Color, and Mate Choice in Guppies

  • Anne E. Houde
Princeton University Press: 1997. Pp. 210. $49.50, £35 (hbk); $19.95, £14.95 (pbk)

It is hard not to like a book with an appendix titled “How to build a better bordello”, although the subjects on display here are male guppies. Building an effective bordello, or at least a reliable way to determine mating preferences, is important to biologists who study guppies, and, like much of the rest of this book, turns out to be of interest to researchers into sexual selection in other species as well.

For studies of adaptation in the wild in general and of mate choice in particular, guppies have been a model system for many years, and the author synthesizes the results of decades of research. She carefully distinguishes between speculation and fact, and provides one of the most lucid analyses of current mate-choice models I have read. Literature cited on sexual selection is impressively broad for vertebrates, less so for insects and other invertebrates.

Is the book just for ‘guppy people’? Yes and no; researchers anxious to keep up with the nuances of the latest experiments on the significance of the amount of orange area relative to the intensity of orange will find details of limited interest to the rest of us. The last few chapters, however, particularly the concluding section, provide an inspiring guide to future directions in behavioural ecology.

The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin's Puzzle

  • Amotz Zahavi &
  • Avishag Zahavi
Oxford University Press: 1997. Pp. 286. $30, £18.99

At first sight, the peacocks tail emblazoned across the dustjacket is an affront to evolution by natural selection. Surely such a cumbersome trait could not arise by ‘survival of the fittest’? Such naive criticisms were pre-empted by Darwin with his theory of sexual selection.

In the mid-1970s, Amotz Zahavi published a controversial series of papers in which he claimed that all previous theories of sexual selection were flawed. Instead, he proposed his handicap principle. Moreover, he asserted that Darwin's demarcation between natural and sexual selection was incorrect, the true distinction being between natural and ‘signal’ selection.

This insightful yet accessible book explains the handicap principle and applies it to the analysis of a wide variety of behavioural phenomena: altruism, mate choice, the signalling between predator and prey, to name but a few. Many of the Zahavis' ideas are inspired and should be required reading for all zoologists and interested lay people. Unfortunately, this high praise must come with at least one caveat: the book is extremely tendentious. Although the authors provide a rigorous defence of their own position, rival theories are often unfairly dismissed with glib and specious arguments.

Overall, this is a beguiling tale, pleasantly illustrated, which is of genuine and general importance to our understanding of evolution and animal behaviour.