Mating traits and fitness components in two breeding designs in Drosophila serrata
Data files
May 31, 2022 version files 1.01 MB
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Population_1.csv
270.42 KB
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Population_2.csv
737.32 KB
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README_Population_1.txt
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README_Population_2.txt
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Abstract
Misalignment between male and female interests over mating creates inter-locus sexual conflict that is known to drive the coevolution of reproductive traits. Males and females also share the majority of their genome, which may cause these traits to genetically covary between the sexes and experience intra-locus sexual conflict where beneficial alleles in one sex are costly when expressed in the other. Traits expressed during mating may uniquely be subject to both intra- and interlocus sexual conflict. Here, we use a biologically repeated quantitative genetic experiment to test whether intra-locus sexual conflict is operating on mating latency, and copulation duration in the polyandrous fruit-fly Drosophila serrata. Mating latency and copulation duration were both heritable in males but not in females, and within sex and across-sex genetic correlations among the traits were all small. We found no significant genetic covariance between any measured mating behaviours and fitness components, nor between male and female fitness, suggesting that these traits are not under strong selection. Our study, therefore, finds little evidence of ongoing intra-locus sexual conflict over these traits. One explanation for our result is that these mating traits have historically been under strong selection, which has exhausted their genetic variation, making it difficult to detect selection in these populations. Keywords: mating latency, copulation duration, quantitative genetics, sexual conflict, Drosophila serrata, multivariate analyses, cuticula.