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Divergent male and female mate preferences do not explain incipient speciation between lizard lineages.

ABSTRACT: Diversification in sexual signals is often taken as evidence for the importance of sexual selection in speciation. However, in order for sexual selection to generate reproductive isolation between populations, both signals and mate preferences must diverge together. Furthermore, assortative mating may result from multiple behavioral mechanisms, including female mate preferences, male mate preferences, and male-male competition; yet their relative contributions are rarely evaluated. Here, we explored the role of mate preferences and male competitive ability as potential barriers to gene flow between 2 divergent lineages of the tawny dragon lizard, Ctenophorus decresii, which differ in male throat coloration. We found stronger behavioral barriers to pairings between southern lineage males and northern lineage females than between northern males and southern females, indicating incomplete and asymmetric behavioral isolating barriers. These results were driven by both male and female mate preferences rather than lineage differences in male competitive ability. Intrasexual selection is therefore unlikely to drive the outcome of secondary contact in C. decresii, despite its widely acknowledged importance in lizards. Our results are consistent with the emerging view that although both male and female mate preferences can diverge alongside sexual signals, speciation is rarely driven by divergent sexual selection alone.

SUBMITTER: McLean CA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7705505 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Divergent male and female mate preferences do not explain incipient speciation between lizard lineages.

McLean Claire A CA Bartle Richard A RA Dong Caroline M CM Rankin Katrina J KJ Stuart-Fox Devi D

Current zoology 20200312 5

Diversification in sexual signals is often taken as evidence for the importance of sexual selection in speciation. However, in order for sexual selection to generate reproductive isolation between populations, both signals and mate preferences must diverge together. Furthermore, assortative mating may result from multiple behavioral mechanisms, including female mate preferences, male mate preferences, and male-male competition; yet their relative contributions are rarely evaluated. Here, we expl ...[more]

PMID: 33293929

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Project description:Male songbirds use song to advertise their attractiveness as potential mates, and the properties of those songs have a powerful influence on female mate preferences. One idea is that males may exert themselves maximally in each song performance, consistent with female evaluation and formation of mate preferences being the primary contributors to mate choice. Alternatively, males may modulate their song behaviour to different degrees in the presence of different females, consistent with both male and female mate preferences contributing to mutual mate choice. Here we consider whether male Bengalese finches, Lonchura striata domestica, express mate preferences at the level of individual females, and whether those preferences are manifest as changes in song behaviour that are sufficient to influence female mate choice. We tested this idea by recording songs performed by individual unmated males during a series of 1 h interactions with each of many unmated females. Across recording sessions, males systematically varied both the quantity and the quality of the songs that they performed to different females. Males also varied their song properties throughout the course of each interaction, and behavioural tests using female birds revealed that songs performed at the onset of each interaction were significantly more attractive than songs performed by the same male later during the same interaction. This demonstration of context-specific variation in the properties of male reproductive signals and a role for that variation in shaping female mate preference reveals that male mate preferences play an important role in mutual mate choice in this species. Because these birds thrive so well in the laboratory and are so amenable to observation and experimentation across generations, these results yield a new model system that may prove especially advantageous in disentangling the role of male and female mate preferences in shaping mutual mate choice and its long-term benefits or consequences.

Dataset Information

Divergent male and female mate preferences do not explain incipient speciation between lizard lineages.

Publications

Divergent male and female mate preferences do not explain incipient speciation between lizard lineages.

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