The efficiency of purifying sexual selection under environmental change

• Sexual selection can promote adaptation if sexually selected traits are reliable indicators of the bearer’s condition and overall genetic quality. Moreover, stronger sexual selection in males, as often reported in empirical studies, may efficiently purge deleterious alleles at a low cost to population productivity. However, such benefits of sexual selection have been suggested to be compromised during adaptation in a changing environment due to a disruption of the mate choice process. Indeed, substantial insight has been gained from previous theoretical and empirical studies focusing on exploring female choice and the reliability of male sexual signals across environments. In this study, we show that even if sexually selected traits are honest signals and accurately reflect condition in new environments, the efficacy of sexual selection is likely to be reduced under stress. We model the strength of sex-specific selection in a population with males competing among each other for fertilization success and females experiencing fecundity selection. We observe that, for most of the biologically relevant parameter space describing mating system variation, the strength of sexual selection is reduced relatively to fecundity selection as the population becomes increasingly maladapted under environmental change. This result, which is modulated by the characteristics of the mating system, is a direct consequence of the prominent role of social context (frequency-dependence) in sexual selection.

Ämnesord

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Biologi -- Evolutionsbiologi (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Biological Sciences -- Evolutionary Biology (hsv//eng)

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