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Effects of load-lightening and delayed extrapair benefits on the fitness consequences of helping behavior.

ABSTRACT: In most cooperative breeders, helping is directed at close kin, allowing helpers to gain indirect fitness benefits by increasing the reproductive success of close relatives, usually their parents. Extrapair paternity (EPP) occurs at high rates in some cooperative breeders, reducing the relatedness of helpers to the young they help raise. Even so, a son that helps is related to the brood by at least 0.25 through his mother and to within-pair young by 0.5, whereas a potential helper that has EPP in his own nest is related only to the offspring he sires and unrelated to any extrapair offspring. In birds, EPP often favors older males, which in the extreme case can result in sons being more closely related to young in their parents' nest than to young in their own nests. The fitness benefit of helping will thus be enhanced if helping lightens the workload and increases survival of helpers and their fathers, enabling them to become old, hyper-successful extrapair sires. Here, we develop and analyze a proof-of-concept model, grounded in the western bluebird (Sialia mexicana) system, demonstrating the conditions under which high population levels of EPP can generate inclusive fitness benefits of helping behavior that outweigh the costs. This model provides a new perspective on the relationship between EPP and helping behavior in cooperative breeders and suggests a strong need for empirical work to gather unprecedented data on paternity over the lifetime of helpers and their parents.

SUBMITTER: Stern CA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6191074 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jul-Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Effects of load-lightening and delayed extrapair benefits on the fitness consequences of helping behavior.

Stern Caitlin A CA Dickinson Janis L JL

Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology 20160217 4

In most cooperative breeders, helping is directed at close kin, allowing helpers to gain indirect fitness benefits by increasing the reproductive success of close relatives, usually their parents. Extrapair paternity (EPP) occurs at high rates in some cooperative breeders, reducing the relatedness of helpers to the young they help raise. Even so, a son that helps is related to the brood by at least 0.25 through his mother and to within-pair young by 0.5, whereas a potential helper that has EPP i ...[more]

PMID: 30349177

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Project description:Aneuploidy is a hallmark of tumor cells, and yet the precise relationship between aneuploidy and a cell’s proliferative ability, or cellular fitness, has remained elusive. In this study, we have combined a detailed analysis of aneuploid clones isolated from laboratory-evolved populations of Saccharomyces cerevisiae with a systematic, genome-wide screen for the fitness effects of telomeric amplifications to address the relationship between aneuploidy and cellular fitness. We found that aneuploid clones rise to high population frequencies in nutrient-limited evolution experiments and show increased fitness relative to wild type. Direct competition experiments confirmed that three out of four aneuploid events isolated from evolved populations were themselves sufficient to improve fitness. To expand the scope beyond this small number of exemplars, we created a genome-wide collection of >1,800 diploid yeast strains, each containing a different telomeric amplicon (Tamp), ranging in size from 0.4 to 1,000 kb. Using pooled competition experiments in nutrient-limited chemostats followed by high-throughput sequencing of strain-identifying barcodes, we determined the fitness effects of these >1,800 Tamps under three different conditions. Our data revealed that the fitness landscape explored by telomeric amplifications is much broader than that explored by single-gene amplifications. As also observed in the evolved clones, we found the fitness effects of most Tamps to be condition specific, with a minority showing common effects in all three conditions. By integrating our data with previous work that examined the fitness effects of single-gene amplifications genome-wide, we found that a small number of genes within each Tamp are centrally responsible for each Tamp’s fitness effects. Our genome-wide Tamp screen confirmed that telomeric amplifications identified in laboratory-evolved populations generally increased fitness. Our results show that Tamps are mutations that produce large, typically condition-dependent changes in fitness that are important drivers of increased fitness in asexually evolving populations.

Dataset Information

Effects of load-lightening and delayed extrapair benefits on the fitness consequences of helping behavior.

Publications

Effects of load-lightening and delayed extrapair benefits on the fitness consequences of helping behavior.

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