• DOI:10.1006/anbe.1998.0748
• Corpus ID: 34066689

Reliable signalling need not be a handicap

@article{Getty1998ReliableSN,
  title={Reliable signalling need not be a handicap},
  author={Thomas Getty},
  journal={Animal Behaviour},
  year={1998},
  volume={56},
  pages={253-255}
}

• T. Getty
• Published 1 July 1998
• Environmental Science
• Animal Behaviour

The handicap principle is an important pillar in our understanding of animal communication (Wiley 1994; Ryan 1997; Zahavi & Zahavi 1997). The handicap concept comes from a sports analogy: ‘The investment that animals make in signals is similar to the ‘‘handicaps’’ imposed on the stronger contestants in a game or sporting event’ (Zahavi & Zahavi 1997, page XIV). The concept suggests that ‘conspicuous waste’ is essential to reliable signalling. ’The Handicap Principle is a very simple idea: waste can make sense, because by wasting one proves conclusively that one has enough assets to waste and more’ (Zahavi & Zahavi 1997, page 229). A common interpretation of the handicap principle is that signal size is correlated to sender quality because low-quality signallers cannot afford bigger signals. I will show that, although this is a reasonable interpretation of reliable signalling, the handicap principle itself is superfluous (exceeding what is sufficient or necessary). In an earlier paper I showed that the conventional explanation of how reliable signalling is stabilized by differences in marginal costs lacks generality (Getty 1998). Costs are necessary to establish a trade-off, but differences in marginal costs are neither necessary nor sufficient to explain reliable signalling (see also Johnstone 1997; Reeve 1997). The fundamental requirement for reliability is that the fitness (w) of higher-quality (q) signallers has to be more sensitive to advertising (a), at least near the equilibrium: