can signal characteristics predict male quality?
While there has been considerable interest in female choice for male sexual signals, there have been few studies of the underlying information that different aspects of the signal calls convey. Such studies, however, are essential to understand the significance of signals as honest handicaps, arbitrary Fisherian traits and/or in species recognition. We studied the somewhat exceptional system of audible drumming in the wolf spider Hygrolycosa rubrofasciata. We estimated the repeatabilities of signal components, the levels of between-male variance, the symmetry of the signal, the correlations between different aspects of drumming and their correlations with body weight. While in other taxa the frequency of audible signals may convey honest information of male size, in this species signal frequency was not related to male size and had a low repeatability. The pulse rate within each drum was highly repeatable but had a relatively small between-male coefficient of variation. In previous stu
