| 1. |
- Abalos, Javier, et al.
(författare)
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No evidence for differential sociosexual behavior and space use in the color morphs of the European common wall lizard (Podarcis muralis)
- 2020
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Ingår i: Ecology and Evolution. - : Wiley. - 2045-7758. ; 10:20, s. 10986-11005
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Explaining the evolutionary origin and maintenance of color polymorphisms is a major challenge in evolutionary biology. Such polymorphisms are commonly thought to reflect the existence of alternative behavioral or life-history strategies under negative frequency-dependent selection. The European common wall lizard Podarcis muralis exhibits a striking ventral color polymorphism that has been intensely studied and is often assumed to reflect alternative reproductive strategies, similar to the iconic “rock–paper–scissors” system described in the North American lizard Uta stansburiana. However, available studies so far have ignored central aspects in the behavioral ecology of this species that are crucial to assess the existence of alternative reproductive strategies. Here, we try to fill this gap by studying the social behavior, space use, and reproductive performance of lizards showing different color morphs, both in a free-ranging population from the eastern Pyrenees and in ten experimental mesocosm enclosures. In the natural population, we found no differences between morphs in site fidelity, space use, or male–female spatial overlap. Likewise, color morph was irrelevant to sociosexual behavior, space use, and reproductive success within experimental enclosures. Our results contradict the commonly held hypothesis that P. muralis morphs reflect alternative behavioral strategies, and suggest that we should instead turn our attention to alternative functional explanations.
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| 2. |
- Dougherty, Liam R., et al.
(författare)
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A systematic map of studies testing the relationship between temperature and animal reproduction
- 2024
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Ingår i: Ecological Solutions and Evidence. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 2688-8319. ; 5:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Exposure to extreme temperatures can negatively affect animal reproduction, by disrupting the ability of individuals to produce any offspring (fertility), or the number of offspring produced by fertile individuals (fecundity). This has important ecological consequences, because reproduction is the ultimate measure of population fitness: a reduction in reproductive output lowers the population growth rate and increases the extinction risk. Despite this importance, there have been no large-scale summaries of the evidence for effect of temperature on reproduction.We provide a systematic map of studies testing the relationship between temperature and animal reproduction. We systematically searched for published studies that statistically test for a direct link between temperature and animal reproduction, in terms of fertility, fecundity or indirect measures of reproductive potential (gamete and gonad traits).Overall, we collated a large and rich evidence base, with 1654 papers that met our inclusion criteria, encompassing 1191 species.The map revealed several important research gaps. Insects made up almost half of the dataset, but reptiles and amphibians were uncommon, as were non-arthropod invertebrates. Fecundity was the most common reproductive trait examined, and relatively few studies measured fertility. It was uncommon for experimental studies to test exposure of different life stages, exposure to short-term heat or cold shock, exposure to temperature fluctuations, or to independently assess male and female effects. Studies were most often published in journals focusing on entomology and pest control, ecology and evolution, aquaculture and fisheries science, and marine biology. Finally, while individuals were sampled from every continent, there was a strong sampling bias towards mid-latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, such that the tropics and polar regions are less well sampled.This map reveals a rich literature of studies testing the relationship between temperature and animal reproduction, but also uncovers substantial missing treatment of taxa, traits, and thermal regimes. This database will provide a valuable resource for future quantitative meta-analyses, and direct future studies aiming to fill identified gaps.
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| 3. |
- García-Roa, Roberto, et al.
(författare)
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Condition-transfer maternal effects modulate inter-locus sexual conflict
- 2024
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Ingår i: Behavioral Ecology. - 1045-2249. ; 35:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Strong sexual selection frequently favors males that increase their reproductive success by harming females, with potentially negative consequences for natural populations. Understanding what factors modulate conflict between the sexes is hence critical to understand both the evolution of male and female phenotypes and the viability of populations in the wild. Here, we model the evolution of male harm while incorporating male-induced maternal effects on offspring quality. We show that because male harm can induce condition-transfer maternal effects that reduce the quality of a harming male's own offspring, maternal effects can partially align male and female evolutionary interests and significantly curb the evolution of male harm. These effects are independent of relatedness, the scale of competition, mating system, and whether male harm comes before (i.e., harassment) and/or during/after (i.e., traumatic inseminations or toxic ejaculates) mating and are particularly salient when maternal effects influence offspring ability to inflict (sons) or resist (daughters) harm. Our results underscore the potential importance of considering maternal effects to unravel the evolution of sexual conflict.
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| 4. |
- Gómez-Llano, Miguel, et al.
(författare)
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Male harm suppresses female fitness, affecting the dynamics of adaptation and evolutionary rescue
- 2024
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Ingår i: Evolution Letters. - : Oxford University Press. - 2056-3744. ; 8:1, s. 149-160
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- One of the most pressing questions we face as biologists is to understand how climate change will affect the evolutionary dynamics of natural populations and how these dynamics will in turn affect population recovery. Increasing evidence shows that sexual selection favors population viability and local adaptation. However, sexual selection can also foster sexual conflict and drive the evolution of male harm to females. Male harm is extraordinarily widespread and has the potential to suppress female fitness and compromise population growth, yet we currently ignore its net effects across taxa or its influence on local adaptation and evolutionary rescue. We conducted a comparative meta-analysis to quantify the impact of male harm on female fitness and found an overall negative effect of male harm on female fitness. Negative effects seem to depend on proxies of sexual selection, increasing inversely to the female relative size and in species with strong sperm competition. We then developed theoretical models to explore how male harm affects adaptation and evolutionary rescue. We show that, when sexual conflict depends on local adaptation, population decline is reduced, but at the cost of slowing down genetic adaptation. This trade-off suggests that eco-evolutionary feedback on sexual conflict can act like a double-edged sword, reducing extinction risk by buffering the demographic costs of climate change, but delaying genetic adaptation. However, variation in the mating system and male harm type can mitigate this trade-off. Our work shows that male harm has widespread negative effects on female fitness and productivity, identifies potential mechanistic factors underlying variability in such costs across taxa, and underscores how acknowledging the condition-dependence of male harm may be important to understand the demographic and evolutionary processes that impact how species adapt to environmental change.
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| 5. |
- Iglesias-Carrasco, Maider, et al.
(författare)
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Sexual selection buffers the negative consequences of population fragmentation on adaptive plastic responses to increasing temperatures
- 2024
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Ingår i: Evolution. - 0014-3820. ; 78:1, s. 86-97
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Whether sexual selection facilitates or hampers the ability to plastically respond to novel environments might depend on population structure, via its effects on sexual interactions and associated fitness payoffs. Using experimentally evolved lines of the seed beetle Callosobruchus maculatus, we tested whether individuals evolving under different sexual selection (monogamy vs. polygamy) and population spatial structure (metapopulation vs. undivided populations) treatments differed in their response across developmental thermal conditions (control, hot, or stressful) in a range of fitness and fitness-associated traits. We found that individuals from subdivided populations had lower lifetime reproductive success at hot temperatures, but only in lines evolving under relaxed sexual selection, revealing a complex interaction between sexual selection, population structure, and thermal environmental stress on fitness. We also found an effect of population structure on several traits, including fertility and adult emergence success, under exposure to high thermal conditions. Finally, we found a strong negative effect of hot and stressful temperatures on fitness and associated traits. Our results show that population structure can exacerbate the impact of a warming climate, potentially leading to declines in population viability, but that sexual selection can buffer the negative influence of population subdivision on adaptation to warm temperatures.
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| 6. |
- Londoño-Nieto, Claudia, et al.
(författare)
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Thermal phenotypic plasticity of pre-and post-copulatory male harm buffers sexual conflict in wild Drosophila melanogaster
- 2023
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Ingår i: eLife. - 2050-084X. ; 12
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Strong sexual selection frequently leads to sexual conflict and ensuing male harm, whereby males increase their reproductive success at the expense of harming females. Male harm is a widespread evolutionary phenomenon with a strong bearing on population viability. Thus, understanding how it unfolds in the wild is a current priority. Here, we sampled a wild Drosophila melanogaster population and studied male harm across the normal range of temperatures under which it reproduces optimally in nature by comparing female lifetime reproductive success and underlying male harm mechanisms under monogamy (i.e., low male competition/harm) vs. polyandry (i.e., high male competition/harm). While females had equal lifetime reproductive success across temperatures under monogamy, polyandry resulted in a maximum decrease of female fitness at 24°C (35%), reducing its impact at both 20°C (22%), and 28°C (10%). Furthermore, female fitness components and pre-(i.e., harassment) and post-copulatory (i.e., ejaculate toxicity) mechanisms of male harm were asymmetrically affected by temperature. At 20ºC, male harassment of females was reduced, and polyandry accelerated female actuarial ageing. In contrast, the effect of mating on female receptivity (a component of ejaculate toxicity) was affected at 28ºC, where the mating costs for females decreased and polyandry mostly resulted in accelerated reproductive ageing. We thus show that, across a natural thermal range, sexual conflict processes and their effects on female fitness components are plastic and complex. As a result, the net effect of male harm on overall population viability is likely to be lower than previously surmised. We discuss how such plasticity may affect selection, adaptation and, ultimately, evolutionary rescue under a warming climate.
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| 7. |
- MacGregor, Hannah E A, et al.
(author)
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Experimental contact zones reveal causes and targets of sexual selection in hybridizing lizards
- 2017
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In: Functional Ecology. - : Wiley. - 0269-8463 .- 1365-2435. ; 31:3, s. 742-752
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Divergence in sexually selected traits in allopatry should affect the degree and direction of hybridization. However, few studies have established the causes and targets of sexual selection during secondary contact. Common wall lizards (Podarcis muralis) from north-central Italy have highly exaggerated male sexual traits compared to populations in Western Europe. Using experimental populations, we show that this creates asymmetries in male dominance, spatial habitat use and reproductive success upon secondary contact. Hybridization occurred almost exclusively between males of the Italian lineage and females of the Western European lineage. We provide evidence to suggest stronger ongoing selection on male sexual traits within the dominant Italian lineage. However, these same characters did not predict hybridization, and hybrid matings contributed little to variance in male reproductive success. Instead, most hybrid offspring were sired by Italian males displaying phenotypes associated with lower within-lineage reproductive success. Thus, highly directional hybridization arises because some Italian males are out-competed within their own lineage but remain competitive relative to males of the other lineage. This pattern of hybridization is consistent with the direction of introgression in natural contact zones, but our data suggest that sexual selection acting through hybridization may be weak at the leading edge of natural hybrid zones.
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| 8. |
- Sultanova, Zahida, et al.
(author)
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Genetic sex determination, sex chromosome size and sex-specific lifespans across tetrapods
- 2023
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In: Journal of evolutionary biology. - : Wiley. - 1010-061X .- 1420-9101. ; 36:2, s. 480-494
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Sex differences in lifespan are ubiquitous across the tree of life and exhibit broad taxonomic patterns that remain a puzzle, such as males living longer than females in birds and vice versa in mammals. The prevailing unguarded X hypothesis explains sex differences in lifespan by differential expression of recessive mutations on the X or Z chromosome of the heterogametic sex, but has only received indirect support to date. An alternative hypothesis is that the accumulation of deleterious mutations and repetitive elements on the Y or W chromosome might lower the survival of the heterogametic sex (‘toxic Y’ hypothesis). Here, we use a new database to report lower survival of the heterogametic relative to the homogametic sex across 136 species of birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians, as expected if sex chromosomes shape sex-specific lifespans, and consistent with previous findings. We also found that the relative sizes of both the X and the Y chromosomes in mammals (but not the Z or the W chromosomes in birds) are associated with sex differences in lifespan, as predicted by the unguarded X and the ‘toxic Y’. Furthermore, we report that the relative size of the Y is negatively associated with male lifespan in mammals, so that small Y size correlates with increased male lifespan. In theory, toxic Y effects are expected to be particularly strong in mammals, and we did not find similar effects in birds. Our results confirm the role of sex chromosomes in explaining sex differences in lifespan across tetrapods and further suggest that, at least in mammals, ‘toxic Y’ effects may play an important part in this role.
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| 9. |
- While, Geoffrey M, et al.
(author)
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Sexual selection drives asymmetric introgression in wall lizards.
- 2015
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In: Ecology Letters. - : Wiley. - 1461-023X. ; 18:12, s. 1366-1375
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Journal article (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Hybridisation is increasingly recognised as an important cause of diversification and adaptation. Here, we show how divergence in male secondary sexual characters between two lineages of the common wall lizard (Podarcis muralis) gives rise to strong asymmetries in male competitive ability and mating success, resulting in asymmetric hybridisation upon secondary contact. Combined with no negative effects of hybridisation on survival or reproductive characters in F1-hybrids, these results suggest that introgression should be asymmetric, resulting in the displacement of sexual characters of the sub-dominant lineage. This prediction was confirmed in two types of secondary contact, across a natural contact zone and in two introduced populations. Our study illustrates how divergence in sexually selected traits via male competition can determine the direction and extent of introgression, contributing to geographic patterns of genetic and phenotypic diversity.
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