Is sexual selection widespread across angiosperm species?
Presented at ESEB 2022 in Prague
talk
Iain R. Moodie 
Patrice David
Tim Janicke
François Rousset
Jeanne Tonnabel
Abstract
Sexual selection is a potent force for driving the evolution of plentiful animal phenotypes and for increasing genetic quality. Sexual selection thinking solely hinges on the anisogamous nature of sexual reproduction by which females produce less numerous and larger gametes than males, thus fostering competition among males. Therefore, sexual selection theory should be universally valid for all sexually reproducing organisms displaying anisogamy, which includes plants. Yet, direct tests of fundamental concepts from the theory of sexual selection in the plant kingdom are lacking. This can be attributed to the rarity by which the central parameter in sexual selection, the number of sexual partners (i.e. mating success), is quantified in plant studies. Promisingly, the only two studies that have quantified mating success in plants have confirmed key predictions of sexual selection thinking, known as Bateman’s principles, with male reproduction relying more on mate acquisition than female reproduction. Here we systematically re-analyse published parentage analyses in plant populations to provide a systematic quantification of the strength of sexual selection through classical Bateman metrics. Specifically, we estimate a genetic proxy of mating and reproductive success by performing parentage analysis and quantify their linear relationship in each sex. Our first analyses of a dozen of such datasets confirms the validity of Bateman’s principles across these plant species. By overcoming a major conceptual barrier in the study of sexual selection in plants, our results point to the pressing need to comprehensively test predictions of the sexual selection theory in plants.
Citation
BibTeX citation:
@unpublished{moodie2022,
author = {Moodie, Iain R. and David, Patrice and Janicke, Tim and
Rousset, François and Tonnabel, Jeanne},
title = {Is Sexual Selection Widespread Across Angiosperm Species?},
date = {2022-08-19},
address = {Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology},
url = {https://irmoodie.com/presentations/moodieESEB2022.html},
langid = {en},
abstract = {Sexual selection is a potent force for driving the
evolution of plentiful animal phenotypes and for increasing genetic
quality. Sexual selection thinking solely hinges on the anisogamous
nature of sexual reproduction by which females produce less numerous
and larger gametes than males, thus fostering competition among
males. Therefore, sexual selection theory should be universally
valid for all sexually reproducing organisms displaying anisogamy,
which includes plants. Yet, direct tests of fundamental concepts
from the theory of sexual selection in the plant kingdom are
lacking. This can be attributed to the rarity by which the central
parameter in sexual selection, the number of sexual partners (i.e.
mating success), is quantified in plant studies. Promisingly, the
only two studies that have quantified mating success in plants have
confirmed key predictions of sexual selection thinking, known as
Bateman’s principles, with male reproduction relying more on mate
acquisition than female reproduction. Here we systematically
re-analyse published parentage analyses in plant populations to
provide a systematic quantification of the strength of sexual
selection through classical Bateman metrics. Specifically, we
estimate a genetic proxy of mating and reproductive success by
performing parentage analysis and quantify their linear relationship
in each sex. Our first analyses of a dozen of such datasets confirms
the validity of Bateman’s principles across these plant species. By
overcoming a major conceptual barrier in the study of sexual
selection in plants, our results point to the pressing need to
comprehensively test predictions of the sexual selection theory in
plants.}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Moodie, I. R., P. David, T. Janicke, F. Rousset, and J. Tonnabel. 2022.
Is
sexual selection widespread across angiosperm species? Talk (10
mins), Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology.