Males influence maternal effects that promote sexual selection: a quantitative genetic experiment with dung beetles Onthophagus taurus
Kotiaho, J. S., Simmons, L., Hunt, J., & Tomkins, J. (2003). Males influence maternal effects that promote sexual selection: a quantitative genetic experiment with dung beetles Onthophagus taurus. The American Naturalist, 161, 852-859. https://doi.org/10.1086/375173
Published in
The American NaturalistDate
2003Copyright
© 2003 by The University of Chicago.
Recently, doubt has been cast on studies supporting good genes sexual selection by the suggestion that observed genetic benefits for offspring may be confounded by differential maternal allocation. In traditional analyses, observed genetic sire effects on offspring phenotype may result from females allocating more resources to the offspring of attractive males. However, maternal effects such as differential allocation may represent a mechanism promoting genetic sire effects, rather than an alternative to them. Here we report results from an experiment on the horned dung beetle Onthophagus taurus, in which we directly compare genetic sire effects with maternal effects that are dependent on sire phenotype. We found strong evidence that mothers provide more resources to offspring when mated with large‐horned males. There were significant heritabilities for both horn length and body size, but when differential maternal effects were controlled, the observed estimates of genetic variance were greatly reduced. Our experiment provides evidence that differential maternal effects may amplify genetic effects on offspring traits that are closely related to fitness. Thus, our results may partly explain the relatively high coefficients of additive genetic variation observed in fitness‐related traits and provide empirical support for the theoretical argument that maternal effects can play an important role in evolution.
...
Keywords
Publication in research information system
https://converis.jyu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/17247212
Metadata
Show full item recordCollections
License
Related items
Showing items with similar title or keywords.
-
Sex-specific assumptions and their importance in models of sexual selection
de Vries, Charlotte; Lehtonen, Jussi (Elsevier BV, 2023)Sexual selection is a field coloured by tension and contrasting views. One contested claim is the causal link from the definition of the sexes (anisogamy) to divergent selection on the sexes. Does theory truly engage with ... -
Implications of size‐selective fisheries on sexual selection
Uusi-Heikkilä, Silva (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020)Fisheries often combine high mortality with intensive size‐selectivity and can, thus, be expected to reduce body size and size variability in exploited populations. In many fish species, body size is a sexually selected ... -
Sex roles and the evolution of parental care specialization
Henshaw, Jonathan M.; Fromhage, Lutz; Jones, Adam G. (The Royal Society Publishing, 2019)Males and females are defined by the relative size of their gametes (anisogamy), but secondary sexual dimorphism in fertilization, parental investment and mating competition is widespread and often remarkably stable over ... -
The balance model of honest sexual signaling
Fromhage, Lutz; Henshaw, Jonathan M. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2022)Costly signalling theory is based on the idea that individuals may signal their quality to potential mates and that the signal's costliness plays a crucial role in maintaining information content (‘honesty’) over evolutionary ... -
Evolutionary importance of intraspecific variation in sex pheromones
De Pasqual, Chiara; Groot, Astrid T.; Mappes, Johanna; Burdfield-Steel, Emily (Elsevier, 2021)Sex pheromones in many insect species are important species-recognition signals that attract conspecifics and inhibit attraction between heterospecifics; therefore, sex pheromones have predominantly been considered to ...