Male wing spot morphology and physiological responses do not coincide with the good-gene hypothesis

Wings play an important role in dipteran life. Wing characteristics like size, coloration, and interference were found to be associated with male fitness. Many species in the genus Drosophila develop a male-specific wing pattern. These patterns appear as spots on the wings. In this work, we expose a set of recently collected out-bred lines of Drosophila biarmipes to a range of environmental stresses. The aim of this work was to find an association between wing pigmentation and stress response. We further looked the results with respect to the 'good gene' hypothesis. Males with higher wing-spot pigmentation did not associate with better stress handling. Interestingly, a majority of the traits showed negative or no trends where presence of a darker wing-spot could be associated to better handling of stressful environments. Contrary to this, desiccation tolerance and body size were found positively associated with darker wing-spot pigmentation. This work exposes the complexities behind secondary sexual characteristics and their association with male fitness and directs to relook the body size role in mate choice.