NEW PUBLICATION about Dietary stress and sexual selection in guppies

Pubblicato il: 23.01.2020 09:40

Title: Dietary stress increases the total opportunity for sexual selection and modifies selection on condition‐dependent traits

Theory predicts that variance in male reproductive success, and therefore the opportunity for sexual selection, should increase when males encounter stressful conditions that impact the expression of condition-dependent sexual traits. We showed that in guppies (Poecilia reticulata), an iconic model for sexual selection research, dietary stress increases variance in male reproductive success, changes the relative contribution of pre- and post-copulatory components of sexual selection, and causes a dramatic shift in multivariate sexual selection patterns. These findings highlight the importance of sexual selection in shaping adaptation to a continuously changing world.

Link to the paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ele.13443

Silvia Cattelan is an evolutionary biologist mainly interested in how environmental conditions affect sexual selection dynamics. She carried out her PhD research at the University of Padua, under the supervision of Prof. Andrea Pilastro working on postcopulatory sexual selection in the guppy. After the PhD, she moved to Prof. Griggio’s lab for a two-year PostDoc on fish social behavior, where she worked also with a species from the Venice lagoon, the Mediterranean killifish. She is currently doing a PostDoc at Pilastro’s lab studying selection on sexual traits under environmental stress.