The work included in this thesis aims at exploring the environmental sensitivity of benefits and costs of sexual selection through a combined empirical and theoretical effort, to increase our understanding of the impact of environmental change on sexually reproducing populations.Can sexual selection promote adaptation to novel environments? Sexual selection for good genes should accelerate adaptation by granting higher reproductive success to individuals of high genetic quality. However, sexual conflict is a frequent outcome of sexual reproduction and may often be detrimental to population fitness. Experimental evolution has shown that the role of sexual selection in adaptation is variable, because of a complex balance between the detrimental and beneficial effects described above.The present thesis is investigating the role of sexual selection in adaptation by focusing on the sex-specific strength of selection and the intensity of intralocus sexual conflict (IaSC) in ancestral and novel environments. The sex-specific strength of selection is a valuable proxy for the benefits of sexual reproduction, since a male-bias in selection caused by sexual selection should allow efficient purging of deleterious alleles with little impact on female fecundity and cost to population fitness.This thesis investigates both sex-specific selection and IaSC across benign and novel environments in two species of seed beetles, Callosobruchus maculatus and Acanthoscelides obtectus, and includes a theoretical model of the effect of environmental change on of sexual selection. The empirical part of my results indicates that, generally, selection at the adult stage is male biased but that this male bias may be reduced under stress, pointing towards reduced benefits of sexual selection under rapid environmental change. Additional simulations suggest that the frequency dependent nature of sexual selection alone could explain this trend. No empirical support was found for the reduction of IaSC under stress.It is becoming crucial today to understand the impact of environmental change on natural populations. This thesis brings new material adding to our understanding of the role of sexual selection within that particular issue. The outcome of sexual selection is dependent on a variety of mechanisms, such as good genes processes and sexual conflict, which are very likely to be dependent on ecological factors and specificity of the system studied. For that reason, carefully controlled experiments on laboratory systems and mathematical modelling are necessary steps that should ultimately lead to the study of similar questions in natural systems.

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La capacité de persistance d’une population face à un changement environnemental stressant est une question complexe à l’interface entre l’écologie et l’évolution. Le processus par lequel une population échappe à l’extinction en s’adaptant aux nouvelles conditions environnementales stressantes est nommé sauvetage évolutif. Ce cas particulier de dynamique éco-évolutive est de plus en plus étudié autant théoriquement, qu’expérimentalement, entre autres dans le contexte des changements environnementaux d’origines anthropiques. Cependant, les études modélisant ce processus négligent les interactions entre génotypes et environnements impactant le potentiel évolutif des populations faisant aux changements environnementaux. Dans le cadre de cette thèse, j’ai développé des modèles intégrant ces interactions. Pour cela, j’ai modélisé le processus de sauvetage évolutif de populations à reproduction asexuée, face à des changements environnementaux abruptes, en utilisant le paysage adaptatif de Fisher (modèle géométrique de Fisher (1930)). Ce paysage nous a permis de modéliser ces interactions génotypes-environnement et leur impact sur la proportion de mutations pouvant sauver une population. A travers deux modèles, considérant soit le sauvetage d’une population par une mutation d’effet fort, soit par un grand nombre de mutations d’effets faibles, nous avons pu dégager des prédictions pour la probabilité de sauvetage évolutif en fonction des conditions environnementales et des caractéristiques de l’organisme étudié. Ces modèles peuvent être paramétrés sur des données d’évolution expérimentale et leurs prédictions comparées à des données de traitement antibiotiques visant des pathogènes asexués. Au-delà du sauvetage évolutif, les modèles développés nous ont également permis d’établir des outils permettant de modéliser d’autres dynamiques éco-évolutives, intégrant des interactions génotype-environnement et leurs effets sur la distribution d’effets des mutations. / The persistence ability of a population facing a stressing environmental change is a complex question at the connection between ecology and evolution. The process by which a population avoid extinction by adapting to the new stressing environmental conditions is termed evolutionary rescue. This particular case of eco-evolutionary dynamic is increasingly investigated both theoretically and experimentally, among other things in the context of the environmental changes from human activity. However, the studies modelling this process neglect the interactions between genotypes and environments impacting the evolutionary potential of the populations facing environmental changes. In the context of this thesis, I developed models integrating these interactions. To this end, I modelled the process of evolutionary rescue in asexual populations, facing abrupt environmental changes, using the adaptive landscape of Fisher (Fisher’s geometric model (1930)). This landscape allowed us to model the genotypes-environments interactions and their impact on the proportion of mutations able to save a population. Using two models, considering either the rescue of a population by a mutation of strong effect, either by a large number of mutation of small effect, we derived predictions for the probability of evolutionary rescue, which depends on the environmental conditions and the characteristics of the studied organism. These models can be parametrized on data from evolutionary experiments and their predictions compared to data of antibiotic treatments aiming on asexual pathogens. Beyond evolutionary rescue, the models developed in this thesis also gave tools to model other eco-evolutionary dynamics, integrating genotype-environment interactions and their effects on the distribution of mutations effects.

The evolutionary options of a population are strongly influenced by the avail- ability of adaptive mutants. In this thesis, I use the concept of neutral networks to show that neutral drift can actually increase the accessibility of adaptive mu- tants, and therefore facilitate adaptive evolutionary change. Neutral networks are groups of unique genotypes which all code for the same phenotype, and are connected by simple point mutations. I calculate the size and shape of the networks in a small but exhaustively enumerated space of RNA genotypes by mapping the sequences to RNA secondary structure phenotypes. The qual- itative results are similar to those seen in many other genotype–phenotype map models, despite some significant methodological differences. I show that the boundary of each network has single point–mutation connections to many more phenotypes than the average individual genotype within that network. This means that paths involving a series of neutral point–mutation steps across a network can allow evolution to adaptive phenotypes which would otherwise be extremely unlikely to arise spontaneously. This can be likened to walking along a flat ridge in an adaptive landscape, rather than traversing or jumping across a lower fitness valley. Within this model, when a genotype is made up of just 10 bases, the mean neutral path length is 1.88 point mutations. Furthermore, the map includes some networks that are so convoluted that the path through the network is longer than the direct route between two sequences. A minimum length adaptive walk across the genotype space usually takes as many neutral steps as adaptive ones on its way to the optimum phenotype. Finally I show that the shape of a network can have a very important affect on the number of generations it takes a population to drift across it, and that the more routes between two sequences, the fewer generations required for a population to find an advantageous sequence. My conclusion is that, within the RNA map at least, the size, shape and connectivity of neutral networks all have a profound effect on the way that sequences change and populations evolve, and by not considering them, we risk missing an important evolutionary mechanism.