Variation in condition can result from environmental heterogeneity or genetic variation affecting resource acquisition and processing ability. Although condition should be positively correlated with the fitness of both males and females, the strength of selection on condition may differ between the sexes due to differences in reproductive variance. Sexual selection on male condition has been proposed to reduce mutation load, but only if selection is greater on males than females. To investigate the strength of selection on condition, the quality of the larval environment was used to manipulate the condition of Drosophila melanogaster. Additionally, selection was measured when the availability of key resources for females (live yeast) and males (access to females) were altered. Overall, selection was found to be stronger on males than females. However, selection on males weakened under a female-biased sex ratio, whereas selection on females was not significantly affected by the abundance of live yeast.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/25539 |
| Date | 31 December 2010 |
| Creators | Zikovitz, Andrea Elizabeth |
| Contributors | Agrawal, Aneil |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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