Sexually dimorphic eye-size in Dragonfishes, a response to a bioluminescent signaling gap

Deep-sea fishes must overcome extremely large nearest-neighbor distances and darkness to find mates. Sexual dimorphism in the size of luminescent structures in many deep-sea taxa, including dragonfishes (family Stomiidae), indicates reproductive behaviors may be mediated by visual signaling. This presents a paradox: if male photophores are larger, females may find males at shorter distances than males find females. Solutions to this gap may include females closing this gap or by males gathering more photons with a larger eye. We examine the eye size of two species of dragonfishes (Malacosteus niger and Phostomias guernei) for sexual dimorphism and employ a model of detection distance to evaluate the potential for such dimorphism to bridge the detection gap. This model incorporates the flux of sexually dimorphic postorbital photophores and eye lens size to predict detection distances. In both species, we found a significant visual detection gap in which females find males before males fi..., Specimen Data
Postorbital photophore area, lens size, and standard length (SL) data were taken from 42 spec- imens of M. niger (7.6–16.4 cm SL; 25 male, 16 female; Table S1) and 63 specimens of P. guernei (4.4–14.0 cm SL; 30 male, 32 female) obtained from Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. We took images of the head of each specimen with a Nikon D6 digital camera and measured the area of the postorbital photophore in cm2 using ImageJ (Schneider et al., 2012). These data are contained in the file `eye_PO_data.csv`.
Flux Data

The flux (E) of the postorbital photophore of both species is unknown, but we presume it varies with photophore size as in other deep-sea teleosts. Therefore, we predicted the flux of each individual based on data for the postorbital photophore of Aristostomias scintillans, a close relative of both species, from Mensinger and Case (1990, J. of Exp. Mar. Biol. & Ecol. 144:1–15). The data for this study are in `mes.cas.flux.dat.csv`.

, , # Sexually dimorphic eye-size in Dragonfishes, a response to a bioluminescent signaling gap
Two files are required to run our analysis:

1. Specimen data that are contained in a single file `eye_PO_data.csv`. The columns include the following:

-mcz: the Museum of Comparative Zoology catalog number.

-sex: the sex of the individual.

-mass: the mass of the individual (in g); not used in the study. NA values indicate this was not measured.

-sl: standard length (in cm).

-jl: jaw length (in cm); not used in the study. NA values indicate this was not measured.

-eye: orbit diam (in mm); not used in the study as the orbit was often damaged. NA values indicate this was not measured.

-ao: the area of the anterior orbital photophore (in mm^2); only recorded for males of the genus Photostomias; NA for all others.

-po: the area of the posterior orbital photophore (in mm^2).

-genus: the genus, Photostomias (P. guernei) or Malacosteus (M. niger).

-diam. lens diam...