Male disguised females: costs and benefits of female‐limited dimorphism in a butterfly

1. In polymorphic species, two or more discrete phenotypes co‐occur simultaneously. Sex‐limited polymorphism is a particular case of polymorphism, in which several discrete morphs coexist within one of the two sexes only. Several hypotheses were proposed to explain the existence and the maintenance of sex‐limited polymorphism in insects: (i) the morphs have similar fitness, such as similar survival and expected fecundity, and their frequencies vary randomly (i.e. the null hypothesis); (ii) harassment by males is reduced towards the less common female morph, in this case andromorph females (i.e. the male mimicry and learned mate recognition hypotheses); (iii) morphs differ in predation risk (i.e. the predation hypothesis); or (iv) morphs differ in thermoregulation ability (i.e. the thermoregulation hypothesis). 2. Field observations and experiments were employed to compare the relative support of these hypotheses using dimorphic females of the bog fritillary butterfly. Differences were detected between morphs in survival, fecundity, harassment by males, predation pressure and thermal properties, thereby rejecting the null hypothesis. 3. The lifestyle of both morphs is associated with different costs and benefits, with advantages in daily survival and precocious emergence for the gynomorph females, and advantages in fecundity, predation and male harassment for the andromorph females. Besides, as the bog fritillary butterfly is protandrous (i.e. males emerge before females), the longer development of andromorph females puts them at risk of emerging when all the males are dead. The results raise the question as to which mechanisms control the ontogenetic pathways driving the production of the two morphs (i.e. genetic polymorphism or phenotypic plasticity).