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Environmental compl...
Abstract
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- Sexual selection and the evolution of costly mating strategies can negatively impact population viability and adaptive potential. While laboratory studies have documented outcomes stemming from these processes, recent observations suggest that the demographic impact of sexual selection is contingent on the environment and therefore may have been overestimated in simple laboratory settings. Here we find support for this claim. We exposed copies of beetle populations, previously evolved with or without sexual selection, to a 10-generation heatwave while maintaining half of them in a simple environment and the other half in a complex environment. Populations with an evolutionary history of sexual selection maintained larger sizes and more stable growth rates in complex (relative to simple) environments, an effect not seen in populations evolved without sexual selection. These results have implications for evolutionary forecasting and suggest that the negative demographic impact of sexually selected mating strategies might be low in natural populations. Sexual selection can both aid and impede evolutionary rescue. This study shows that the complexity of the environment can play a central role in how sexual selection impacts population viability and adaptive potential, and suggests that complex environments may increase the net benefit of sexual selection.image
Subject headings
- NATURVETENSKAP -- Biologi -- Evolutionsbiologi (hsv//swe)
- NATURAL SCIENCES -- Biological Sciences -- Evolutionary Biology (hsv//eng)
- NATURVETENSKAP -- Biologi -- Ekologi (hsv//swe)
- NATURAL SCIENCES -- Biological Sciences -- Ecology (hsv//eng)
Keyword
- climate change
- demography
- evolutionary rescue
- extinction risk
- fertility
- global warming
- mating behaviour
- sexual conflict
- sexual selection
- temperature
Publication and Content Type
- ref (subject category)
- art (subject category)
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