Rapid divergent evolution of internal female genitalia and the coevolution of male genital morphology revealed by micro-computed tomography
Data files
Jan 10, 2024 version files 15.32 MB
Abstract
Animal genitalia are thought to evolve rapidly and divergently in response to sexual selection. Studies of genital evolution have focused largely on male genitalia, with our understanding of female genital evolution relatively limited. The paucity of work on female genital morphology is likely due to problems faced in quantifying shape variation, due to their composition and accessibility. Here we use a combination of micro-computed tomography, landmark-free shape quantification, and phylogenetic analysis to quantify the rate of female genital shape evolution among 29 species of Antichiropus millipedes, and the coevolution of male genitalia. We found significant variation in female and male genital shape among species. While male genital shape showed significant phylogenetic signal, female genital shape did not. Male genital shape was found to be evolving 1.2 times faster than female genital shape. Female and male genital shapes exhibited strongly correlated evolution, indicating that genital shape changes in one sex are associated with corresponding changes in the genital shape of the other sex. This study adds novel insight into our growing understanding of how female genitalia can evolve rapidly and divergently and highlights the advantages of three-dimensional techniques and multivariate analyses in studies of female genital evolution.
README
Data from: Rapid divergent evolution of internal female genitalia and the coevolution of male genital morphology revealed by micro-computed tomography
Nadia S. Sloan1, Mark S. Harvey1,2, Joel A. Huey1,2,3 and Leigh W. Simmons1
1Centre for Evolutionary Biology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Western Australia, Crawley 6009, Australia.
2Department of Terrestrial Zoology, Western Australian Museum, Welshpool 6986, Australia.
3Biologic Environmental, East Perth 6004, Australia.
ORCID iD NSS, 0000-0002-4081-5031; MSH, 0000-003-1482-0109; JAH, 0000-0001-7108-0552; LWS, 0000-0003-0562-1474
The data necessary to conduct the analyses reported in Sloan et al. are provided within this zip file. When expanded the folder contains two folders, “PLY files females” and “PLY files males”, two nexus files, and 6 csv files containing data.
Each PLY file (polygon file format) contains the 3D scan data for each male gonopod and each female receptaculum for all samples of the species used in the comparative analysis. Each file is labelled with the species name and the West Australian Museum Voucher number (e.g. DIP015T150043) except A. variabilis which has the collection location (e.g. variabilisSerpNPfem2, Serpentine National Park female 2). These files can be entered into the Generalized Procrustes Surface Analysis (GPSA) software available in Pomidor et al. (2016)
The files “male_gpsa_ordination_projections_all” and “female_gpsa_ordination_projections_all” are .csv files that are outputs from the GPSA software, and contain scores on the axes of variation (135 axes for males, 130 axes for females) that describe the shape of male and female genital structures. These data files can be used to conduct all of the analyses described in Sloan et al. 2024, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London: B.
Two summary files are also provided, “male.ord.summary” and “female.ord.summary”, which provide the eigenvalue (value) for each axis of variation from the GPSA, the proportion of variance explained by that axis (pro) and the cumulative proportion of variance explained (cum). These data can be used to recreate Figure S5 found in the online supporting material of Sloan et al.
Data on collum area (mm^2) for each species can be found in the csv files “male_collum” and “female_collum” and can be used in analyses of trait shape to control for species body size.
The two nexus files, “1.4% run 1 nexus” and 2.3% run 1 nexus” provide the phylogenies calibrated with divergence rates of 1.4%/Ma and 2.3%/Ma required for the phylogenetic analyses described in Sloan et al. Molecular data used to construct phylogenies are available at Genbank using the accession numbers provided in Table S5 of the online supporting material of Sloan et al.
Pomidor B.J., Makedonska J., Slice D.E. 2016 A landmark-free method for three-dimensional shape analysis. PLOS ONE 11(3), e0150368. (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0150368).