Title: The role of learning in speciation by sexual selection
Abstract:
The process of speciation, which has led to the incredible biodiversity that we observe in nature, has generated enthusiasm and heated debate ever since Darwin published The Origin of Species. However, our understanding of certain fundamental aspects of the speciation process remains poor. While there is solid evidence for natural selection’s role in speciation, whether sexual selection can, on its own, lead to the origin of species remains controversial. Sexual selection can accelerate speciation by driving divergence in mating traits and the preferences for them. However, ruling out the effect of ecological selection as the driver of such divergence is difficult. Social learning, understood as the development of behaviors involved in mate choice and competition for access to mates through interactions with conspecifics, provides a mechanism in which sexual selection alone could set the stage for speciation. Male-male competition biases towards an animal’s own phenotype can alleviate selection against less common morphs, a density-dependent process that can maintain mating trait variation. When this process is coupled with female assortative mating, reproductive isolation can arise rapidly, a first step towards speciation. I hypothesize that divergence in mating traits and associated behaviors in the strawberry poison frog Oophaga pumilio has been facilitated by the evolution of learned behavioral biases. I will test my hypothesis by comparing both aggression biases in males and mating preferences in females among populations of this color-diverse species.
Richards-Zawacki Lab
Wednesday September 6th, 2023
12:00 PM
A219B Langley Hall