The effect of size on mate selection in guppies.

Sexual selection in species tends to be a popular topic of study among scientists. Guppies are an easy species to study for this topic as they are small, easy to care for, and easy to observe. Much study has been done regarding the visual preferences of female guppies in sexual selection, but less so for males (Herdman et al. 2004). This study focuses on the less studied male guppies. In this experiment we tested whether male guppies preferred larger females or standard size females. We hypothesized that male guppies would prefer larger females as they may find them more sexually attractive because fertility of female guppies tends to increase with size. When a male guppy was presented with a standard size, red female guppy and a large, red female guppy we found there was no significance difference in time spent with each model, so we cannot conclude the male guppies prefer a certain size mate. This could be due to various reasons, including predation.