Evolution of female ornamentation in dance flies: valuable gifts are worth dressing up for

Elaborate female ornaments are rare in nature. One explanation for this is that female investment in ornamentation may take away crucial resources from other costly life history traits, such as fecundity, for which there is likely to be a higher fitness return. However, this trade-off between ornaments and fecundity may be less severe in species where the males offer the female an edible nuptial gift during mating. The nutrition gained from mating may make attracting mates with elaborate ornaments more cost-effective for the female.
We investigated this link in dance flies in which there is large variation in nuptial gifts, as well as female ornaments. The dataset includes categorical values of the level female ornamentation per species, based on inspected museum specimens, as well as the categorical level of nuptial gift value based on previously published dance fly literature. The dataset also includes a COI/CAD-based phylogenetic tree of all the dance fly species included in the stud..., , # Data from: Evolution of female ornamentation in dance flies: valuable gifts are worth dressing up for

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.mpg4f4rd5](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.mpg4f4rd5)

## Description of the data and file structure

This dataset is a part of the manuscript “Evolution of female ornamentation in dance flies: valuable gifts are worth dressing up for”. The species-level data is collected in 2022-2024 from previously published literature (nuptial gift data) and inspection of museum specimens.

### Files and variables

#### File: empid-data.csv

**Description:** Main data file

##### Variables

* Species: Dance fly species
* DetailedGiftData: A binary category if the species in question had several published observations or several individuals observed about their use/lack of nuptial gifts.
* GiftScore: Categorical classes assigned for the average value of nuptial gift in the species. 1 = mating does not involve a nuptial gift, 2 = mating can happen with or without a nuptial ...,