Search results for "Mating Preference"
showing 6 items of 36 documents
Selection analysis on the rapid evolution of a secondary sexual trait
2015
Evolutionary analyses of population translocations (experimental or accidental) have been important in demonstrating speed of evolution because they subject organisms to abrupt environmental changes that create an episode of selection. However, the strength of selection in such studies is rarely measured, limiting our understanding of the evolutionary process. This contrasts with long-term, mark–recapture studies of unmanipulated populations that measure selection directly, yet rarely reveal evolutionary change. Here, we present a study of experimental evolution of male colour in Trinidadian guppies where we tracked both evolutionary change and individual-based measures of selection. Guppie…
Personality may confound common measures of mate-choice.
2011
5 pages; International audience; The measurement of female mating preferences is central to the study of the evolution of male ornaments. Although several different methods have been developed to assess sexual preference in some standardized way, the most commonly used procedure consists of recording female spatial association with different males presented simultaneously. Sexual preference is then inferred from time spent in front of each male. However, the extent to which the measurement of female mate-choice is related to exploration tendencies has not been addressed so far. In the present study we assessed the influence of variation in exploration tendencies, a trait closely associated …
The evolution of mating preferences for genetic attractiveness and quality in the presence of sensory bias.
2022
The aesthetic preferences of potential mates have driven the evolution of a baffling diversity of elaborate ornaments. Which fitness benefit—if any—choosers gain from expressing such preferences is controversial, however. Here, we simulate the evolution of preferences for multiple ornament types (e.g., “Fisherian,” “handicap,” and “indicator” ornaments) that differ in their associations with genes for attractiveness and other components of fitness. We model the costs of preference expression in a biologically plausible way, which decouples costly mate search from cost-free preferences. Ornaments of all types evolved in our model, but their occurrence was far from random. Females typically p…
The extent of variation in male song, wing and genital characters among allopatric Drosophila montana populations.
2007
Drosophila montana, a species of the Drosophila virilis group, has distributed around the northern hemisphere. Phylogeographic analyses of two North American and one Eurasian population of this species offer a good background for the studies on the extent of variation in phenotypic traits between populations as well as for tracing the selection pressures likely to play a role in character divergence. In the present paper, we studied variation in the male courtship song, wing and genital characters among flies from Colorado (USA), Vancouver (Canada) and Oulanka (Finland) populations. The phenotypic divergence among populations did not coincide with the extent of their genetic divergence, sug…
Trade-off between warning signal efficacy and mating success in the wood tiger moth
2011
The coloration of species can have multiple functions, such as predator avoidance and sexual signalling, that directly affect fitness. As selection should favour traits that positively affect fitness, the genes underlying the trait should reach fixation, thereby preventing the evolution of polymorphisms. This is particularly true for aposematic species that rely on coloration as a warning signal to advertise their unprofitability to predators. Nonetheless, there are numerous examples of aposematic species showing remarkable colour polymorphisms. We examined whether colour polymorphism in the wood tiger moth is maintained by trade-offs between different functions of coloration. In Finland, m…
Review paper: Ecological genetics of Brachionus sympatric sibling species
1998
In this paper we review previous studies on sympatric Brachionus populations in Torreblanca Marsh as a model of evolutionary and ecological relationships between closely related species. The marsh is a wetland on the Mediterranean coast of Spain with high spatial and temporal heterogeneity. Allozyme and morphometric analysis showed that Brachionus group plicatilis (formerly, Brachionus plicatilis and currently split into B. plicatilis and B. rotundiformis) was composed of three groups of genotypes with no evidence of gene flow between them (B. plicatilis, B. rotundiformis SM and B. rotundiformis SS). Correlations between seasonal and spatial distributions, on one hand, and temperature and s…