The visual pigments of cones and rods in three species of mollies, Poecilia mexicana, Poecilia latipinna and their asexual hybrid Poecilia formosa, were examined using microspectrophotometry. In P. mexicana, populations from extreme photic habitats were used: one population originated from a clear water habitat, one from a milky water habitat and another from a completely dark cave. Ultraviolet...

Variation in mating preferences coupled with selective predation may allow for the maintenance of alternative mating strategies. Males of the South American live-bearing fish Poecilia parae fall in one of five discrete morphs: red, yellow, blue, stripe-coloured tail (parae) and female mimic (immaculata). Field surveys indicate that the red and yellow morphs are the rarest and that their rarity ...

Aim To understand the relative contributions of environmental factors, dispersal limitations and the presence of sperm donors in determining the distribution of the Amazon molly (Poecilia formosa), a sperm-dependent unisexual fish species of hybrid origin. To explore niche similarities and/or differences between the hybrid and parental species. To evaluate whether large-scale abiotic factors ca...

This study reports significant differences between the gynogenetic Amazon molly Poecilia formosa and one of its sperm hosts, and the sexual sailfin molly Poecilia latipinna in the critical temperatures at which individual fishes lost motion control. Based on these measurements, it is suggested that cold snaps occurring in winter, but not summer temperatures, can significantly change population ...

Female Amazon mollies, Poecilia formosa, are a unisexual species that reproduce by gynogenesis. They must coexist and mate with males of other species (usually the mollies Poecilia latipinna or Poecilia mexicana) to induce embryogenesis, but inheritance is strictly maternal. We examined the mating preference of the male sailfin molly, P. latipinna, for female sailfin mollies versus Amazon molli...

Citation: Bierbach D, Lukas J, Bergmann A, Elsner K, Höhne L, Weber C, Weimar N, Arias-Rodriguez L, Mönck HJ, Nguyen H, Romanczuk P, Landgraf T and Krause J (2018) Insights into the Social Behavior of Surface and Cave-Dwelling Fish (Poecilia mexicana) in Light and Darkness through the Use of a Biomimetic Robot. Front. Robot. AI 5:3. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2018.00003 insights into the social Behavio...

The maintenance of sexual reproduction in the face of its supposed costs is a major paradox in evolutionary biology. The Red Queen hypothesis, which states that sex is an adaptation to fast-evolving parasites, is currently one of the most recognized explanations for the ubiquity of sex and predicts that asexual lineages should suffer from a higher parasite load if they coexist with closely rela...

In animals, including humans, the social environment can serve as a public information network in which individuals can gather public information about the quality of potential mates by observing conspecifics during sexual interactions. The observing individual itself is also a part of this information network. When recognized by the observed conspecifics as an audience, his/her presence could ...

Male sailfin mollies Poecilia latipinna were tested in five different treatments that varied in the relative frequency of heterospecific gynogens (Amazon molly Poecilia formosa) to conspecific females to determine whether social interactions among males within a population causes some males to mate with heterospecific females. Male P. latipinna inseminated a significantly higher proportion of c...