Data from: Cost of an elaborate trait: a tradeoff between attracting females and maintaining a clean ornament

Many sexually selected ornaments and weapons are elaborations of an
animal’s outer body surface, including long feathers, colorful skin, and
rigid outgrowths. The time and energy required to keep these traits clean,
attractive, and in good condition for signaling may represent an
important, but understudied cost of bearing a sexually selected trait.
Male fiddler crabs possess an enlarged and brightly colored claw that is
used both as a weapon to fight with rival males and also as an ornament to
court females. Here, we demonstrate that males benefit from grooming
because females prefer males with clean claws over dirty claws, but also
that the time spent grooming detracts from the amount of time available
for courting females. Males therefore face a temporal tradeoff between
attracting the attention of females and maintaining a clean claw. Our
study provides rare evidence of the importance of grooming for mediating
sexual interactions in an invertebrate, indicating that sexual selection
has likely shaped the evolution of self-maintenance behaviors across a
broad range of taxa.