Samuel Cotton’s research while affiliated with University College London and other places

... Nearly all species of Diopsidae (Bilberg, 1820) are well-known for their exaggerated eye stalks (Shillito 1971). There are approximately 160-8000 species and 10-15 genera containing stalk-eyed flies in the family Diopsidae (Shillito 1971;Steyskal 1972;Carr et al. 2006;Ovtshinnikova and Galinskaya 2016;Roskov et al. 2019). Although both males and females in Diopsinae have eyes that are laterally displaced from the central head, the level of sexual dimorphism varies between and within species (Burkhardt and de la Motte 1985; Wilkinson and Dodson 1997;Meier and Hilger 2000). ...

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Description of the karyotype of Sphyracephala detrahens (Diptera, Diopsidae)

... The geographically close habitat ranges of Bactrocera and the potential donor genus Teleopsis led to the proposal that the horizontal transfer may have occurred in New Guinea. The species composition of Teleopsis is under debate [29][30][31], however here it is used within its broadest sense to include the putatively nested or synonymous genera Cyrtodiopsis and Megalobops. ...

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The evolutionary history of mariner elements in stalk-eyed flies reveals the horizontal transfer of transposons from insects into the genome of the cnidarian Hydra vulgaris

... It has long been recognized that the genetic relationship between male sexual display traits and components of nonsexual fitness such as condition is an important empirical pursuit in understanding the evolution of female mating preferences (Cotton et al., 2004;Hunt et al., 2004;Tomkins et al., 2004). Our results suggest that if we are to understand the evolution of male mating preferences, analyses of male preferences for female sexual display traits will need to be complemented with a detailed understanding of their genetic basis. ...

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Male choice generates stabilizing sexual selection on a female fecundity correlate

... Although less studied than female mate choice, there is evidence that male mate choice is common across taxa [15][16][17][18][19] and is often based on female traits that are correlated with fecundity [17][18][19][20][21]. Despite reproductive senescence causing female fecundity to decline with age, there is mixed evidence of how male mate choice is affected by female age. ...

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Genetic variation in age-dependent attractiveness in a fish with a mixed mating system

... Females have evolved responses or preferences to prevent them from mating with SGE carriers in some cases. In stalk-eyed flies, females preferentially mate with males with wider eye spans, whereas SGE-carrying males are generally associated with smaller eye spans (Cotton et al., 2014;Wilkinson et al., 1988). The presence of sperm-killing meiotic drive also correlates with the rate of polyandry in populations, where meiotic drive is more common in areas with low polyandry (Pinzone & Dyer, 2013;Price et al., 2014). ...

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The suppression of a selfish genetic element increases a male's mating success in a fly

... Chaetodiopsis Séguy (Diopsinae). An endemic genus of two described species: C. comoroensis (Carr & Földvári, 2006), described from Comoros (Carr et al. 2006); and C. meigenii, the commonest sub-Saharan diopsid, widely distributed in the continental Afrotropics and even extending into Oman in the Southern Arabian Peninsula . The genus is one of the four genera comprising the Diasemopsis genus-group. ...

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64. Diopsidae (Stalk-eyed Flies and Afromontane Forest Flies)

... Common ancestry makes species means nonindependent of each other (Felsenstein, 1985); thus, we also performed the same sets of analyses described above with phylogeny taken into account. Because there is no published phylogeny that includes all of the taxa we studied, we created a composite phylogeny (Fig. 1) from Baker & Wilkinson (2001), Wright et al. (2004), Swallow et al. (2005), and Földvári et al. (2007, and set branch lengths equal to 1 because the divergence times among the different species are unclear. We then used the PDAP:PDTREE module (Garland, Midford & Ives, 1999; Midford, Garland & Maddison, 2005) in MESQUITE, version 2.72 (Maddison & Maddison, 2009) to calculate standardized phylogenetically independent contrasts (Felsenstein, 1985). ...

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HusakEtAl2011BJLS

... Biological ornaments are conspicuous traits considered to function as condition-dependent signals of mate quality during mate selection (Hill, 2014;Winters, 2018), though they may serve a dual role as armaments (i.e., weapons or status badges; Berglund et al., 1996). Examples of visual ornamentation can be found across many taxa, such as the colourful iridescent tail feathers of peacocks (Pavo cristatus; Dakin and Montgomerie, 2013) and the long eye stalks of stalk-eyed flies (Teleopsis dalmanni; Cotton et al., 2010). As condition-dependent signals, ornaments are reported to have higher quality under more favourable environmental conditions (e.g., head ornaments of unparasitised vs parasitised male red jungle fowl, Gallus gallus, progenitor of the domestic fowl; Zuk et al., 1990). ...

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Comb size, shape complexity and laterality of laying hens reared in environments varying in resource choice

... This may also explain why the relationship between the vibrational interaction and frontal leg length found for losers have similar but non-significant trends as the ones found for winners. In animal contests, it is common for the larger rival to be more aggressive than the smaller one (e.g. Brown et al. 2006;Small et al. 2009;Graham et al. 2020) including spider contests (Whitehouse 1997;Taylor et al. 2001;Elias et al. 2008). In T. clavipes, in particular, males escalate the interaction to physical contact more frequently when the contest involves two individuals of greater size than two individuals of smaller size (Constant et al. 2011). ...

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Vibrating aggression: spider males perform an unusual assessment strategy during contest displays

... The direct benefits and costs of polyandry have been documented for several species of insects, even when only using two males as the polyandry treatment Wedell 1998, Worthington andKelly 2016). Nonetheless, in other cases, the direct benefits of polyandry are not detected or are minimal (Jennions et al. 2007, Harley et al. 2010, as in this experiment. Regarding the possible indirect benefits of polyandry beyond egg viability, like inbreeding avoidance, increased genetic compatibility, and increased offspring fitness (Ivy and Sakaluk 2005) it was not possible to detect them with our design, and requires further scrutiny (Jennions et al. 2007, Slatyer et al. 2012. ...

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One and Done: Long-Term Sperm Storage in the Cactus-Feeding Bug, Narnia femorata (Hemiptera: Coreidae)