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Exploring the influence of nutrition on the duration of singing in Gryllodes sigillatus, the decorated cricket - does diet quality affect mate signalling?
This report looks at the relationships between nutrition, mass, and the length of sexual signalling songs in the decorated cricket.
Main findings:
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The more nutritional the cricket's diet, the more weight they gain - For each 12% increase in nutrition, a cricket will gain an additional 0.005 grams.
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The more nutritional the cricket's diet, the longer they sing - Each 12% increase in nutrition increases song duration by 0.37 seconds.
General Conclusion:
- Crickets with a more nutritional diet will gain more weight and also have more energy to expend on performing the costly calling song.
- The longer a cricket's song, the more likely it is to attract a female, so diet quality subsequently has an influence on reproductive ability
The following packages were used during the data analysis and visualisation process: tidyverse to transform and present data (Wickham et al. 2019), colorBlindness to check plot accessibility (Ou 2021), rstatix for statistical tests (Kassambara 2021), performance for evaluating the fit of models (Lüdecke et al. 2021), MASS to perform boxcox function (Venables and Ripley 2002), broom to tidy data and outputs (Robinson, Hayes, and Couch 2022), and patchwork to combine multiple plots into single visuals (Pedersen 2022).