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Studies that provide estimates of the form and magnitude of selection on herbivore traits at the level of individual plants in natural populations represent a vital step in understanding the interaction of selection and gene flow among host‐affiliated insect populations when individual plants equate to differing selective regimes. We analyzed phenotypic selection on the trait gall size for a host‐specific...
Fluctuating (nondirectional) asymmetry (FA) of bilaterally paired structures on a symmetrical organism is commonly used to assay the developmental instability (DI) caused by environmental or genetic factors. Although evidence for natural selection to reduce FA has been reported, evidence that FA (and by extension DI) is heritable is weak. We report the use of artificial selection to demonstrate heritable...
Patterns of morphological disparity yield important insight into the causes of diversification and adaptive radiation in East African cichlids. However, comparisons of cichlid disparity have often failed to consider the effects that differing clade ages or stochasticity may have on disparity before making interpretations. Here, a model of branching morphological evolution allows assessment of the...
Evolutionary costs of parasite resistance arise if genes conferring resistance reduce fitness in the absence of parasites. Thus, parasite‐mediated selection may lead to increased resistance and a correlated decrease in fitness, whereas relaxed parasite‐mediated selection may lead to reverse evolution of increased fitness and a correlated decrease in resistance. We tested this idea in experimental...
Recent speciation events provide potential opportunities to understand the microevolution of reproductive isolation. We used a marker‐based approach and a common garden to estimate the additive genetic variation in skeletal traits in a system of two ecomorphs within the coral species Favia fragum: a Tall ecomorph that is a seagrass specialist, and a Short ecomorph that is most abundant on coral reefs...
A significant goal of recent theoretical research on pathogen evolution has been to develop theory that bridges within‐ and between‐host dynamics. The main approach used to date is one that nests within‐host models of pathogen replication in models for the between‐host spread of infectious diseases. Although this provides an elegant approach, it nevertheless suffers from some practical difficulties...
In the marine environment, differential gene exchange between partially reproductively isolated taxa can result in introgression that extends over long distances due to high larval dispersal potential. However, the degree to which this process contributes to interlocus variance of genetic differentiation within introgressed populations remains unclear. Using a genome‐scan approach in the Indo‐Pacific...
Horizontal gene transfer mediated by transformation is of central importance in bacterial evolution. However, numerous questions remain about the maintenance of processes that underlie transformation. Most hypotheses for the benefits of transformation focus on what bacteria might do with DNA, but ignore the important fact that transformation is subsumed within the broader process of competence. Accordingly,...
Ultraviolet (UV) light is a major cause of stress, mutation, and mortality in microorganisms, causing numerous forms of cellular damage. Nevertheless, there is tremendous variation within and among bacterial species in their sensitivity to UV light. We investigated direct and correlated responses to selection during exposure to UV. Replicate lines of Escherichia coli K12 were propagated for 600 generations,...
Gene flow is traditionally thought to be antagonistic to population differentiation and local adaptation. However, recent studies have demonstrated that local adaptation can proceed provided that selection is greater than the homogenizing effects of gene flow. We extend these initial studies by combining ecology (climate), phenotype (body size), physiological genetics (oxidative phosphorylation genes),...
Developmental stability is the tendency of morphological traits to resist the effects of developmental noise, and is commonly evaluated by examining fluctuating asymmetry (FA)—random deviations from perfect bilateral symmetry. Molecular mechanisms that control FA have been a long‐standing topic of debate in the field of evolutionary biology and quantitative genetics. In this study, we mapped genomic...
Predation is a major driving force in evolution. Predation has been shown to select for size, morphology, and camouflage. Many animals use camouflage to reduce predation risk. In some cases, individuals can adjust their pigmentation, enabling them a higher survival in a heterogeneous environment. Here, we show that the difference in pigmentation between juvenile perch individuals (Perca fluvuiatilis...
Recombination is a powerful policing mechanism to control intragenomic cheats. The “parliament of the genes” can often rapidly block driving genes from cheating during meiosis. But what if the genome parliament is reduced to only two members, or supergenes? Using a series of simple game‐theoretic models inspired by the peculiar genetics of Oenothera sp., we illustrate that a two supergene genome (α...
Recent studies in Kenya and Ghana have shown that individuals who inherit two malaria‐protective genetic disorders of haemoglobin—α+ thalassaemia and sickle cell trait—experience a much lower level of malaria protection than those who inherit sickle cell trait alone. We have previously demonstrated that this can limit the frequency of α+ thalassaemia in a population in which sickle cell is present,...
Hermaphroditic individuals can produce both selfed and outcrossed progeny, termed mixed mating. General theory predicts that mixed‐mating populations should evolve quickly toward high rates of selfing, driven by rapid purging of genetic load and loss of inbreeding depression (ID), but the substantial number of mixed‐mating species observed in nature calls this prediction into question. Lower average...
Adaptive radiation is usually thought to be associated with speciation, but the evolution of intraspecific polymorphisms without speciation is also possible. The radiation of cichlid fish in Lake Victoria (LV) is perhaps the most impressive example of a recent rapid adaptive radiation, with 600+ very young species. Key questions about its origin remain poorly characterized, such as the importance...
Natural selection can reduce the effective population size of the nonrecombining Y chromosome, whereas local adaptation of Y‐linked genes can increase the population divergence and overall intra‐species polymorphism of Y‐linked sequences. The plant Silene latifolia evolved a Y chromosome relatively recently, and most known X‐linked genes have functional Y homologues, making the species interesting...
In a recent study of the symbiosis between bacteria and plasmids, the available evidence suggests that experimental evolution of plasmid virulence was primarily driven by within‐host competition caused by superinfection. The data do not exclude the possibility, however, that a trade‐off between virulence and infectious transmission to uninfected bacteria also played a minor role.
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