10.5061/DRYAD.RD05N
Arbuthnott, Devin
University of Ottawa
Agrawal, Aneil F.
University of Toronto
Rundle, Howard D.
University of Ottawa
Data from: Remating and sperm competition in replicate populations of
Drosophila melanogaster adapted to alternative environments
Dryad
dataset
2015
ecological divergence
2015-01-31T00:00:00Z
2015-01-31T00:00:00Z
en
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0090207
71438 bytes
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CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
The prevalence of sexual conflict in nature, as well as the supposedly
arbitrary direction of the resulting coevolutionary trajectories, suggests
that it may be an important driver of phenotypic divergence even in a
constant environment. However, natural selection has long been central to
the operation of sexual conflict within populations and may therefore
constrain or otherwise direct divergence among populations. Ecological
context may therefore matter with respect to the diversification of traits
involved in sexual conflict, and if natural selection is sufficiently
strong, such traits may evolve in correlation with environment, generating
a pattern of ecologically-dependent parallel evolution. In this study we
assess among-population divergence both within and between environments
for several traits involved in sexual conflict. Using eight replicate
populations of Drosophila melanogaster from a long-term evolution
experiment, we measured remating rates and subsequent offspring production
of females when housed with two separate males in sequence. We found no
evidence of any variation in male reproductive traits (offense or
defense). However, the propensity of females to remate diverged
significantly among the eight populations with no evidence of any
environmental effect, consistent with sexual conflict promoting
diversification even in the absence of ecological differences. On the
other hand, females adapted to one environment (ethanol) tended to produce
a higher proportion of offspring sired by their first mate as compared to
those adapted to the other (cadmium) environment, suggesting
ecologically-based divergence of this conflict phenotype. Because we find
evidence for both stochastic population divergence operating outside of an
ecological context and environment-dependent divergence of traits under
sexual conflict, the interaction of these two processes is an important
topic for future work.
female rematingremating status of experimental femalesremated females
offspringoffspring phenotype and number for remated experimental
femalesmale reproductive defense rematingremating status of females from
the male reproductive defense assaymale reproductive defense
offspringoffspring phenotype and number for remated females from the male
reproductive defense assaymale reproductive offense rematingremating
status of females from the male reproductive offense assaymale
reproductive offense offspringoffspring phenotype and number for remated
females from the male reproductive offense assay