Sexual Selection Increases Male Behavioral Consistency in Drosophila melanogaster

Abstract

Sexual selection has been suggested to influence the expression of male behavioral consistency. However, despite predictions, direct experimental support for this hypothesis has been lacking. Here, we investigated whether sexual selection altered male behavioral consistency in Drosophila melanogaster-a species with both pre- and postcopulatory sexual selection. We took 1,144 measures of locomotor activity (a fitness-related trait in D. melanogaster) from 286 flies derived from replicated populations that have experimentally evolved under either high or low levels of sexual selection for >320 generations. We found that high sexual selection males were more consistent (decreased within-individual variance) in their locomotor activity than male conspecifics from low sexual selection populations. There were no differences in behavioral consistency between females from the high and low sexual selection populations. Furthermore, while females were more behaviorally consistent than males in the low sexual selection populations, there were no sex differences in behavioral consistency in high sexual selection populations. Our results demonstrate that behavioral plasticity is reduced in males from populations exposed to high levels of sexual selection. Disentangling whether these effects represent an evolved response to changes in the intensity of selection or are manifested through nongenetic parental effects represents a challenge for future research.

Keywords

among-individual variation; animal personality; behavioral flexibility; behavioral syndrome; intrasexual selection; intersexual selection

Published in

American Naturalist
2024, volume: 203, number: 6, pages: 713 - 725
Publisher: UNIV CHICAGO PRESS

SLU Authors

• Brand, Jack

  • Department of Wildlife, Fish and Environmental Studies, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    
  • Monash University

UKÄ Subject classification

Evolutionary Biology
Zoology

Publication identifier

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/729600

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/129164