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Publications (145)
With climate change, animals face both rising temperatures and more variable food availability. Many species have evolved an adaptative response to historic variation in food availability: they grow faster after a period of diet restriction (“compensatory growth”). However, higher temperatures may reduce the capacity for compensatory growth in ecto...
Mating with close relatives (‘inbreeding’) is common in small, fragmented populations. Inbreeding leads to a higher frequency of loci with homozygous recessive alleles, which can have serious consequences for offspring fitness (‘inbreeding depression’). In addition, females may differentially invest resources when they mate with a related or a nonr...
Inbreeding impairs the cognitive abilities of humans, but its impact on cognition in other animals is poorly studied. For example, environmental stress (e.g. food limitation and extreme temperatures) often amplifies inbreeding depression in morphological traits, but whether cognition is similarly affected is unclear. We, therefore, tested if a high...
Global warming is reducing prey availability in many aquatic systems, raising questions about the combined effects of higher temperatures and lower food availability on fish life histories and reproductive output.
In ectotherms, higher temperatures accelerate growth and promote an earlier onset of reproduction. However, when fish have less food dur...
Males often strategically adjust the number of available sperm based on the social context (i.e., sperm priming response), but it remains unclear how environmental and genetic factors shape this adjustment. In freshwater ecosystems, high ambient temperatures often lead to isolated pools of hotter water in which inbreeding occurs. Higher water tempe...
Males often strategically adjust the number of available sperm based on the social context (i.e. sperm priming response), but it remains unclear how environmental and genetic factors shape this adjustment. In freshwater ecosystems, high ambient temperatures often lead to isolated pools of hotter water in which inbreeding occurs. Higher water temper...
Males often strategically modify their rate of sperm production based on the social context, but it remains unclear how environmental and genetic factors shape this plasticity. In freshwater ecosystems, high ambient temperatures often lead to isolated pools of hotter water in which inbreeding occurs. Higher water temperatures and inbreeding can imp...
Past reproductive effort allows males to assess their ability to acquire mates, but it also consumes resources that can reduce their future competitive ability. Few studies have examined how a male’s reproductive history affects his subsequent mate choice; and, to date, no study has determined the relative contribution of past mating behavior and p...
The primary function of animal nests is to protect developing offspring from hostile and fluctuating environments. Animal builders have been shown to adjust nest construction in response to changes in their environment. However, the extent of this plasticity, and its dependence on an evolutionary history of environmental variability, is not well un...
Holometabolous insects have four distinct life-stages – eggs, larvae, pupae and adults. Active resource acquisition generally occurs during either or both the larval and adult stages. Previous research on the acquisition of food resources in holometabolous insects, has shown that resources acquired during each of these life-stages can differ in how...
Developmental and adult environments can interact in complex ways to influence the fitness of individuals. Most studies investigating effects of the environment on fitness focus on environments experienced and traits expressed at a single point in an organism's life. However, environments vary with time, so the effects of the environments that orga...
Sexual conflict and sexually antagonistic coevolution are driven by differences in reproductive interests between the sexes. There have been numerous studies focused on how both the social and physical environment that individuals experience as adults, or where mating occurs, mediate the intensity of sexual conflict. However, how the physical envir...
Early and late life environments can interact in complex ways to influence the fitness of individuals. Most studies investigating effects of the environment on fitness focus on environments experienced and traits expressed at a single point in an organism's life. However, environments vary with time, thus the environments organisms experience at di...
Many studies ask whether young or older males are better at acquiring mates. Even so, how age affects reproductive success is still poorly understood because male age and mating history are confounded in most studies: older males usually have more mating experience. To what extent does mating history rather than age explain variation in male mating...
Older males often perform poorly under post-copulatory sexual selection. It is unclear, however, whether reproductive senescence is because of male age itself or the accumulated costs of the higher lifetime mating effort that is usually associated with male age. To date, very few studies have accounted for mating history and sperm storage when test...
Older males often perform poorly under post-copulatory sexual selection. It is unclear, however, whether reproductive senescence is due to male age itself or the accumulated costs of the higher lifetime mating effort that is usually associated with male age. To date, very few studies have accounted for male mating history when testing for the effec...
The environment organisms experience during development can have effects which carry over into their adult lives. These environments not only affect adult traits at a given point in time, but also how these traits change with age. Generally, favorable developmental environments lead to more optimal adult traits while stressful environments are dele...
Maternal effects are an important evolutionary force that may either facilitate adaptation to a new environment or buffer against unfavourable conditions. The degree of variation in traits expressed by siblings from different mothers is often sensitive to environmental conditions. This could generate a Maternal-by-Environment interaction (M × E) th...
The competitive environment that animals experience during development constitutes an important source of selection that can influence the development, expression and evolution of traits. Here, we examine how the sex of focal and “competitor” individuals interact to affect development in the Eastern mosquitofish Gambusia holbrooki. We raised indivi...
Temperature experienced during early development can affect a range of adult life‐history traits. Animals often show seemingly adaptive developmental plasticity—with animals reared at certain temperatures performing better as adults at those temperatures. The extent to which this type of adaptive response occurs in gonadal tissue that affects sperm...
As cities continue to grow it is increasingly important to understand the long-term responses of wildlife to urban environments. There have been increased efforts to determine whether urbanization imposes chronic stress on wild animals, but empirical evidence is mixed. Here, we conduct a meta-analysis to test whether there is, on average, a detrime...
In intraspecific competition, the sex of competing individuals is likely to be important in determining the outcome of competitive interactions and the way exposure to conspecifics during development influences adult fitness traits. Previous studies have explored differences between males and females in their response to intraspecific competition....
The environment organisms experience during development can have effects which carry over into their adult lives. These developmental environments may not only affect adult traits at a given point in time, but also how these traits change with age. Generally, stressful developmental environments can lead to sub-optimal adult fitness traits and a fa...
Why females mate multiply has been a long-standing question in evolutionary ecology. In attempts to answer this question, many studies on diverse taxa have highlighted various costs and benefits associated with reproduction. However, how the costs of mating differ from the costs of harassment and whether they vary with environmental conditions are...
Many organisms use different antipredator strategies throughout their life, but little is known about the reasons or implications of such changes. For years, it has been suggested that selection by predators should favour uniformity in local warning signals. If this is the case, we would expect high resemblance in colour across life stages in apose...
The academic disciplines of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) have long suffered from a lack of diversity. While in recent years there has been some progress in addressing the underrepresentation of women in STEM subjects, other characteristics that have the potential to impact on equality of opportunity have received less att...
In many species, males exhibit phenotypic plasticity in sexually selected traits when exposed to social cues about the intensity of sexual competition. To date, however, few studies have tested how this plasticity affects male reproductive success. We initially tested whether male mosquitofish, Gambusia holbrooki (Poeciliidae), change their investm...
When males and females differ in their reproductive interests, each sex attempts to increase its own reproductive success, sometimes to the detriment of its mate. The environment that individuals experience has been shown to be fundamental in mediating this sexual conflict, since it can alter the balance between the costs and benefits that males an...
Theory predicts that warning signals should exhibit low variation to increase learning efficiency in predators. Many species, however, exhibit variation in warning colours within species and even within populations. An understudied example of within species variation is that between life stages, where animals change warning colouration throughout o...
Stressful conditions, like novel host environment, can stimulate mothers to produce offspring with phenotypes that better suit the conditions they are likely to experience (i.e. adaptive maternal effects). However, mothers might vary in their ability to adjust their offspring's phenotype in response to environmental cues. This could generate a mate...
The timing of reproduction is critical to reproductive success in many animal species. Parents that can perceive and respond to environmental cues and time the hatching/birth of their offspring to optimal environmental conditions show higher reproductive success. Intertidal ectotherms are under particularly strong selection because larval developme...
Urbanization leads to a rapid and drastic transformation of habitats, forcing native fauna to manage novel ecological challenges or to move. Sexual selection is a powerful evolutionary force, which is sometimes predicted to enhance the ability of species to adapt to novel environments because it allows females to choose high-quality males, but othe...
Many studies investigate the benefits of polyandry, but repeated interactions with males can lower female reproductive success. Interacting with males might even decrease offspring performance if it reduces a female's ability to transfer maternal resources. Male presence can be detrimental for females in two ways: by forcing females to mate at a hi...
Understanding how organisms mitigate the impacts of climate warming is one of the biggest challenges facing modern-day biologists. For tropical ectotherms, staying cool is critical for avoiding thermal stress, so individuals that are able to maintain territories in cool microhabitats are likely to gain fitness advantages. This study evaluated the i...
Many studies quantify how polyandry affects female fitness by allowing females to either mate with one or several males. But even if the number of matings is standardized, such studies conflate any costs of interacting with males with the potential benefits of receiving sperm from several males, obscuring the benefits of polyandry. We conducted a 2...
Most sexually selected traits are costly to produce and therefore tend to show condition-dependent expression. But individuals have a finite set of resources to invest across the multiple traits on which sexual selection acts. This necessarily leads to trade-offs among individual traits and between different reproductive stages. The effect of male...
Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) often lower their host’s future reproductive success by inducing sterility. Females can minimise the reproductive cost of infection by plastically increasing their current reproductive effort (i.e. terminal investment) before they become sterile. In polyandrous systems, long-term female survival or fecundity i...
Several studies have shown that sexual experience can alter a male's mating behaviour to increase his future mating success. One explanation is that experienced males are better at courting females and inducing them to mate. Experienced males might also be better at identifying higher quality mates, although fewer studies have tested for this benef...
Lay summary
In the past decade the scientific community has been trying to tackle the historical underrepresentation of women in science and the fact that gender can constitute a barrier to career success. However, other characteristics, such as being of an ethnic minority or coming from an under-privileged background, have received less attention....
In polyandrous species, a male’s reproductive success depends on his ability to fertilize females, which, in turn, depends on his mating ability and his ability to produce competitive ejaculates. In many species, sperm traits differ between old and young males in ways that are likely to decrease the sperm competitiveness and fertility of older male...
Theory predicts that warning signals should exhibit low variation to increase learning efficiency in predators. However, many species exhibit variation in warning colours within species and even within populations. An understudied example of within species variation is that between life stages, where animals change warning colouration throughout on...
There is increased concern about poor scientific practices arising from an excessive focus on P-values. Two particularly worrisome practices are selective reporting of significant results and ‘P-hacking’. The latter is the manipulation of data collection, usage, or analyses to obtain statistically significant outcomes. Here, we introduce the novel,...
Access to multiple males can benefit a female in terms of increased fecundity and/or offspring performance. However, the presence of more males can also impose costs on females that arise from an elevated mating rate (e.g. due to increased genital damage, loss of feeding opportunities) and/or increased harassment. Different environments might influ...
For species exhibiting parental care, the way in which parents adjust care behaviour to compensate for environmental change potentially influences offspring survival and, ultimately, population viability. Using the three‐spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) – a species in which males provide parental care by building and tending a nest and f...
Previous studies suggest that immune-challenged individuals need to allocate resources to the immune system to combat infection, reducing escape ability and increasing the vulnerability of infected individuals to predators. Such behavioural responses might change in anthropogenic habitats where the balance between predation risk and countering infe...
Parental effects on offspring performance have been attributed to many factors such as parental age, size, and condition. However, we know little about how these different parental characteristics interact to determine parental effects, or the extent to which their effect on offspring depends on either the sex of the parent or that of the offspring...
Winning or losing a fight can have lasting effects on competitors. Controlling for inherent fighting ability and other factors, a history of winning often makes individuals more likely to win future contests, while the opposite is true for losers (the 'winner-loser effect'). But does the winner-loser effect also influence a male's mating success? W...
Mating often bears large costs to females, especially in species with high levels of sexual conflict over mating rates. Given the direct costs to females associated with multiple mating, which include reductions in lifespan and lifetime reproductive success, past research focused on identifying potential indirect benefits (through increases in offs...
The costs of mating for a female might depend on both her phenotype and that of her mate. Sexually antagonistic male traits that negatively affect females are often condition dependent, so a male's rearing environment can affect the costs he imposes on his mate. Likewise, a female's ability to resist male-imposed costs might be condition dependent....
Environmental conditions experienced by a species during its evolutionary history may shape the signals it uses for communication. Consequently, rapid environmental changes may lead to less effective signals, which interfere with communication between individuals, altering life history traits such as predator detection and mate searching. Increased...
The impact of environmental conditions on the expression of genetic variance and on maternal effects variance remains an important question in evolutionary quantitative genetics. We investigate here the effects of early environment on variation in seven adult life history, morphological, and secondary sexual traits (including sperm characteristics)...
Wildlife diseases are emerging at a higher rate than ever before meaning that understanding their potential impacts is essential, especially for those species and populations that may already be of conservation concern. The link between population genetic structure and the resistance of populations to disease is well understood: high genetic divers...
Spatial and temporal variation in environmental factors and the social setting can help to maintain genetic variation in sexually selected traits if it affects the strength of directional selection. A key social parameter which affects the intensity of, and sometimes predicts the response to, mating competition is the operational sex ratio ( OSR ;...
Mating with relatives has often been shown to negatively affect offspring fitness (‘inbreeding depression’). There is considerable evidence for inbreeding depression due to effects on naturally selected traits, particularly those expressed early in life, but there is less evidence of it for sexually selected traits. This is surprising because sexua...
Chemical communication in aquatic species can affect many key life history traits, such as prey and predator detection and mate searching. However, changes in the environment can disrupt the effectiveness of signals and the ability of individuals to detect these signals. Many studies have examined the effect of secondary compounds from exotic plant...
Selection can favor phenotypic plasticity in mate choice in response to environmental factors that alter the costs and benefits of being choosy, or of choosing specific mates. Human-induced environmental change could alter sexual selection by affecting the costs of mate choice, or by impairing the ability of individuals to identify preferred mates....
Table S1. Vector loadings on the first principle component of courtship behaviours performed by male three‐spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus) during experimental mate choice trials.
The detrimental effects of matings between relatives are well known. However, few studies determine the extent to which inbreeding depression in males is due to natural or sexual selection. Importantly, measuring fitness or key fitness components, rather than phenotypic traits allows more accurate estimation of inbreeding depression.
We investigate...
Inbreeding is often associated with a decrease in offspring fitness (‘inbreeding depression’). Moreover, it is generally assumed that the negative effects of inbreeding are exacerbated in stressful environments. This G × E interaction has been explored in many taxa under different environmental conditions. These studies usually manipulate environme...
Non-genetic inheritance (NGI) is the transmission of parental factors, other than DNA sequences, to offspring that then affect their phenotype. Within the last decade, NGI has invoked considerable interest from evolutionary biologists. Numerous models indicate that NGI could be an important contributor to processes driven by natural selection, incl...
Background
Challenging conditions experienced early in life, such as a restricted diet, can detrimentally affect key life-history traits. Individuals can reduce these costs by delaying their sexual maturation, albeit at the price of the later onset of breeding, to eventually reach the same adult size as individuals that grow up in a benevolent envi...
Lizards often respond to predators by hiding in sunless refuges, but this eliminates opportunities for thermoregulatory basking. Hiding can therefore lower body condition. Furthermore, in ectotherms basking is important to induce fever and activate an immune response. A potential trade-off therefore exists between lowering predation risk and elevat...
Sexual cues, including extended phenotypes, are expected to be reliable indicators of male genetic quality and/or provide information on parental quality. However, the reliability of these cues may be dependent on stability of the environment, with heterogeneity affecting how selection acts on such traits. Here we test how environmental change medi...
With global change accelerating the rate of species' range shifts, predicting which are most likely to establish viable populations in their new habitats is key to understanding how biological systems will respond. Annually, in Australia, tropical fish larvae from the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) are transported south via the East Australian Current (E...
Background
The optimal allocation of resources to sexual signals and other life history traits is usually dependent on an individual’s condition, while variation in the expression of sexual traits across environments depends on the combined effects of local adaptation, mean condition, and phenotypic responses to environment-specific cues that affec...
S1. Supplementary data analysis and results.
Table S1.1: Effects of selection regime on male genital shape variation.
Table S1.2: Effects of selection regime on female genital shape variation.
Table S2.1: Relative warps obtained from the geometric morphometric analysis of male genitalia.
Table S2.2: Relative warps obtained from the geometric mo...
Nature Communications 6, Article number: 8449 (2015); Published: 29 September 2015; Updated: 27 May 2016 In the Methods section of this Article, a detail of the analysis involved in producing Fig. 4 and Table 2 was omitted. The section ‘Mapping and detection of differential expression’ should state that the overall magnitude of gene expression chan...
Male genitalia often show remarkable differences among related species in size, shape and complexity. Across poeciliid fishes, the elongated fin (gonopodium) that males use to inseminate females ranges from 18 to 53% of body length. Relative genital size therefore varies greatly among species. In contrast, there is often tight within-species allome...
Male standard length and gonopodium length for all males measured for generation 10 (after one round of relaxed selection) for all 9 lines.
File (csv format) to run along with tsp file (Supplementary Data 12) in the provided R script (Supplementary Data 13) to obtain male body shape data for all males measured for all 9 lines.
File (csv format) to run along with tsp file (Supplementary Data 8) in the provided R script (Supplementary Data 9) to obtain female body shape data for all females measured for all 9 lines.
Tsp file to run using R script (Supplementary Data 9) to obtain female body shape data for all females measured for all 9 lines.
R script to run to obtain female body shape data for all females measured for all 9 lines
File (csv format) to run along with tsp file (Supplementary Data 12) in the provided R script (Supplementary Data 13) to obtain male body shape data for all males measured for all 9 lines.
Tsp file to run using R script (Supplementary Data 13) to obtain male body shape data for all males measured for all 9 lines.
R script to run to obtain male body shape data for all males measured for all 9 lines
Male standard length and gonopodium length for all males measured for generations 1 to 9 for all 9 lines.
Total female association times with males or an empty 'control' container. Female association times with the Up, Down and Control line males. Data is for all females tested for all 9 lines.
File (csv format) to run along with tsp file (Supplementary Data 16) in the provided R script (Supplementary Data 17) to obtain male gonopodium tip shape for all males measured for all 9 lines.
Tsp file to run using R script (Supplementary Data 17) to obtain male gonopodium tip shape for all males measured for all 9 lines.
Calculation of realized heritability of residual gonopodium length for Up- and Down-selected lines in replicates A, B and C based on LS regressions.
Supplementary Figures 1-9, Supplementary Tables 1-5, Supplementary Methods and Supplementary References
Male and female burst swimming performance for all individuals measured for all 9 lines.
Male reproductive success for all males in all 30 test pools.
File (csv format) to run along with tsp file (Supplementary Data 12) in the provided R script (Supplementary Data 13) to obtain male body shape data for all males measured for all 9 lines.
File (csv format) to run along with tsp file (Supplementary Data 16) in the provided R script (Supplementary Data 17) to obtain male gonopodium tip shape for all males measured for all 9 lines.
R script to run to obtain male gonopodium tip shape for all males measured for all 9 lines.
The data for fecundity of pairs of fish from the same line for all pairs measured in all 9 lines.
Male and female genital morphology varies widely across many taxa, and even among populations. Disentangling potential sources of selection on genital morphology is problematic because each sex is predicted to respond to adaptations in the other due to reproductive conflicts of interest. To test how variation in this sexual conflict trait relates t...
Sexual conflict occurs when selection to maximize fitness in one sex does so at the expense of the other sex. In the burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides, repeated mating provides assurance of paternity at a direct cost to female reproductive productivity. To reduce this cost, females could choose males with low repeated mating rates or smaller,...
Although there are many correlational studies, unbiased estimates of inbreeding depression only come from experimental studies that create inbred and outbred individuals. Few such studies determine the extent to which inbreeding depression in males is due to natural or sexual selection. Importantly, traits that are closely related to fitness are pr...
Conditions experienced early in life can affect key life-history traits. Individuals that experience a poor nutritional environment early in life can reduce potential costs by delaying sexual maturation. The direct costs of delaying maturation are well known (i.e. delayed onset of breeding), but individuals can also face additional costs as adults....
Environmental variation can maintain genetic variation in sexually selected traits if it affects the strength of directional selection. Specifically, environmental variation in sex-specific mortality will change the operational sex ratio (OSR), which predicts the intensity of mating competition. How the OSR affects selection for specific male trait...
Table S2: Position and ecological rationale for each morphological trait used for landmarking in current study (adapted from Farré et al 2013)
Table S1. List of bony fish species (residents and tropical vagrants) used in morphometric analysis
Table S1. List of bony fish species (residents and tropical vagrants) used in morphometric analysis
Table S2: Position and ecological rationale for each morphological trait used for landmarking in current study (adapted from Farré et al 2013)
Identifying targets of selection is key to understanding the evolution of sexually selected behavioral and morphological traits. Many animals have coercive mating, yet little is known about whether and how mate choice operates when these are the dominant mating tactic. Here, we use multivariate selection analysis to examine the direction and shape...
