Sperm Size Decreases With Increasing Pheomelanin Pigmentation but Not With the Amount of Glutathione in the Barn...

Pigment-based coloration is prevalent in animals, but its expression greatly varies across species, populations, and even among individuals in the same populations. Some animals are highly pigmented and thus have conspicuous coloration, whereas others are modestly pigmented and thus have drab coloration. A possible explanation for the variety in pigmentation is a resource-based tradeoff, in which resources invested in pigmentation are unavailable for other functional traits, and thus animals that need to invest in the latter have limited resources to invest in pigmentation. Resource-based tradeoff is plausible in theory, but direct tests are scarce, partially because of many components of pigment-based coloration (i.e., multiple pigments, integument microstructure, and stains) that affect coloration, preventing the use of coloration as an index of pigmentation. Here, using the barn swallow, Hirundo rustica, we examined the relationship between pheomelanin pigmentation in reddish throat patch (a precopulatory sexual trait) and total sperm length (a postcopulatory sexual trait), with particular attention to glutathione as the common resource. We predicted that pheomelanin, which is the predominant pigment in the reddish throat patch, should be negatively related to total sperm length, and that both sexual traits should be further negatively related to the amount of glutathione. As predicted, we found a negative relationship between pheomelanin pigmentation and total sperm length. However, the amount of glutathione in the blood showed no detectable relationship to them. The tradeoff between pheomelanin pigmentation and sperm size, as inferred from the current and previous results, might not be a simple glutathione-based tradeoff.