Presentation Detail

Quantitative Genetics

Prokuda, Alexandra [1], Roff, Derek A [2].

The Strength of Preference and the Heritability of Preferred Traits: A Meta-Analysis.

The maintenance of variation in sexually-selected traits is a puzzle that has received much attention in the past 15 years. Traits that are related to fitness, such as life history or sexually-selected traits, are expected to have low genetic variance (and hence, heritability) due to the rapid fixation of advantageous alleles. However, previous analyses have shown that the heritabilities of sexually-selected traits to be on average higher than life history traits. We show that sexually selected trait heritabilities are actually the same as those of non-sexually selected traits when separated into the trait categories (behavioral, morphological,physiological, song, and suite). In contrast with previous findings, the heritability of preference is quite low (0.28) and is in the same range as life-history traits. We test the hypothesis that the heritability of preferred traits is negatively correlated with the strength of preference. As predicted, the relationship between the heritabilities of preferred traits and the strength of preference for these traits is negative. This suggests that heritabilities do indeed decrease as preference increases but sexual selection is not strong enough to cause heritabilities of sexual traits to deviate from the same type of non-sexually selected traits.

1 - University of California, Riverside, Biology, Department of Biology, Riverside, CA, 92521, USA
2 - University of California, Biology, University of California, Riverside, CA, 92521, USA

Keywords:
heritability
mate choice
Quantitative Genetics
genetic variation
meta-analysis
sexual selection
female preference.

Presentation Type: Regular Oral Presentation
Session: 131
Location: Cotton D/Snowbird Center
Date: Tuesday, June 25th, 2013
Time: 10:45 AM
Number: 131002
Abstract ID:355
Candidate for Awards:W.D. Hamilton Award for Outstanding Student Presentation