Is the conspicuous flag-waving behavior in Anisoscelis alipes (Hemiptera:Coreidae) a social signal?

Exaggerated traits and conspicuous behavior are often assumed to act as social signals, yet some highly ornamented signals have been shown to primarily function in non-social contexts. The matador bug, Anisoscelis alipes (Hemiptera:Coreidae), has large brightly-colored tibial expansions of its hind legs which are used to perform a stereotypic ‘waving’ behavior, the function of which is unknown. If this phenotype functions primarily as a sexually selected signal, we predicted they would be sexual dimorphic both in morphology and behavior, as well as exhibit positive size allometry. Alternatively, if traits function as non-sexual social signals, the frequency or rate of flag-waving should increase with proximity to conspecifics regardless of sex. Morphologically, we found that both males and females exhibited hind leg expansions, which scaled isometrically with body size. Behaviorally, in experimentally constructed social groups we documented 318 bouts of leg waving with 745 instances of ..., , , # Is the conspicuous flag-waving behavior in Anisoscelis alipes (Hemiptera:Coreidae) a social signal?

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.rbnzs7hc7](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.rbnzs7hc7)

This is a dataset of flag-waving behaviour of matador bugs, alone or in the presence of other conspecifics, males and/or females (please see paper for details).

## Description of the data and file structure

Data is structured as time in seconds when an individual waved for each focal individual, with sex and distance (cm) to other individuals also recorded.

## Sharing/Access information

This was primary data collected during experiments.