Ros has a new paper,  “The role of functional constraints in nonrandom mating patterns for a dance fly with female ornaments”, accepted at the Journal of Evolutionary Biology based on her research on dance fly evolution.

Well done Dr. Murray!

A short summary of this work: Female-specific ornaments are extremely rare.  How and why female ornaments evolve is an outstanding question in evolutionary biology.  In a fly species with multiple female-specific ornaments and unusual non-random mating patterns, we tested to see if females displaying the largest ornaments were too heavy or cumbersome for males to carry during aerial mating.  We collected mating pairs of males and females from the field and measured them for body size, female-ornament size and mass.  While we found no evidence that females with large ornaments are too heavy for small males to carry, we did find that these flies display assortative mating.  We suggest that mate choice is driving the mating patterns observed in these flies.