The ‘good genes’ model of sexual selection predicts that sexual and natural selection should act concordantly. However sexual selection can favour alleles in males that are costly when expressed in daughters, placing the two in opposition. The relationship between natural and sexual selection depends on the nature of genetic variation for fitness. Laboratory adaptation may deplete sexually concordant fitness variation, overestimating sexually antagonistic variation and obscuring good genes. I investigated sire-offspring fitness correlations in Drosophila melanogaster populations expected to differ in their levels of sexually concordant fitness variation. In maladapted populations, successful sires produced fitter daughters than unsuccessful sires; this pattern was reversed in adapted populations. Several generations later, successful sires in both population types produced lower fitness daughters than unsuccessful sires, consistent with predictions. However, subsequent generations revealed no effect of sire status on daughter fitness, highlighting the difficulty in testing predictions on the evolutionary dynamics of fitness heritability.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/33222 |
| Date | 20 November 2012 |
| Creators | Gorton, Penelope Ann |
| Contributors | Rowe, Locke |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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