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Actinopterygians (ray‐finned fishes) successfully passed through four of the big five mass extinction events of the Phanerozoic, but the effects of these crises on the group are poorly understood. Many researchers have assumed that the Permo‐Triassic mass extinction (PTME) and end‐Triassic extinction (ETE) had little impact on actinopterygians, despite devastating many other groups. Here, two morphometric...
Sexual isolation, a reproductive barrier, can prevent interbreeding between diverging populations or species. Sexual isolation can have a clear genetic basis; however, it may also result from learned mate preferences that form via sexual imprinting. Here, we demonstrate that two sympatric species of mice—the white‐footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus) and its sister species, the cotton mouse (P. gossypinus...
As organisms age, the effectiveness of natural selection weakens, leading to age‐related decline in fitness‐related traits. The evolution of age‐related changes associated with senescence is likely influenced by mutation accumulation (MA) and antagonistic pleiotropy (AP). MA predicts that age‐related decline in fitness components is driven by age‐specific sets of alleles, nonnegative genetic correlations...
Speciation by sexual selection is generally modeled as the coevolution of female preferences and elaborate male ornaments leading to behavioral (sexual) reproductive isolation. One prediction of these models is that female preference for conspecific males should evolve earlier than male preference for conspecific females in sexually dimorphic species with male ornaments. We tested that prediction...
Maternal effects can provide offspring with reliable information about the environment they are likely to experience, but also offer scope for maternal manipulation of young when interests diverge between parents and offspring. To predict the impact of parent–offspring conflict, we model the evolution of maternal effects on local adaptation of young. We find that parent–offspring conflict strongly...
The Coral Triangle (CT) region of the Indo‐Pacific realm harbors an extraordinary number of species, with richness decreasing away from this biodiversity hotspot. Despite multiple competing hypotheses, the dynamics underlying this regional diversity pattern remain poorly understood. Here, we use a time‐calibrated evolutionary tree of living reef coral species, their current geographic ranges, and...
Male genital diversification is likely the result of sexual selection. Female genital diversification may also result from sexual selection, although it is less well studied and understood. Female genitalia are complex among whales, dolphins, and porpoises, especially compared to other vertebrates. The evolutionary factors affecting the diversity of vaginal complexity could include ontogeny, allometry,...
Outcrossing and self‐fertilization are fundamental strategies of sexual reproduction, each with different evolutionary costs and benefits. Self‐fertilization is thought to be an evolutionary “dead‐end” strategy, beneficial in the short term but costly in the long term, resulting in self‐fertilizing species that occupy only the tips of phylogenetic trees. Here, we use volvocine green algae to investigate...
Divergence in the onset of reproduction can act as an important source of reproductive isolation (i.e., allochronic isolation) between co‐occurring young species, but evidence for the evolutionary processes leading to such divergence is often indirect. While advancing spring seasons strongly affect the onset of reproduction in many taxa, it remains largely unexplored whether contemporary spring advancement...
Oviparous, facultative egg retention enables Drosophila females to withhold fertilized eggs in their reproductive tracts until circumstances favor oviposition. The propensity to retain fertilized eggs varies greatly between species, and is correlated with other reproductive traits, such as egg size and ovariole number. While previous studies have described the phenomenon, no study to date has characterized...
Sperm competition is a postcopulatory sexual selection mechanism in species in which females mate with multiple males. Despite its evolutionary relevance in shaping male traits, the genetic mechanisms underlying sperm competition are poorly understood. A recently originated multigene family specific to Drosophila melanogaster, Sdic, is important for the outcome of sperm competition in doubly mated...
Evaluating trait correlations across species within a lineage via phylogenetic regression is fundamental to comparative evolutionary biology, but when traits of interest are derived from two sets of lineages that coevolve with one another, methods for evaluating such patterns in a dual‐phylogenetic context remain underdeveloped. Here, we extend multivariate permutation‐based phylogenetic regression...
Among the factors that may reduce the predictability of evolution, chaos, characterized by a strong dependence on initial conditions, has received much less attention than randomness due to genetic drift or environmental stochasticity. It was recently shown that chaos in phenotypic evolution arises commonly under frequency‐dependent selection caused by competitive interactions mediated by many traits...
Flowers show important structural variation as reproductive organs but the evolutionary forces underlying this diversity are still poorly understood. In animal‐pollinated species, flower shape is strongly fashioned by selection imposed by pollinators, which is expected to vary according to guilds of effective pollinators. Using the Antillean subtribe Gesneriinae (Gesneriaceae), we tested the hypothesis...
Our understanding of mechanisms operating over deep timescales to shape phenotypic diversity often hinges on linking variation in one or few trait(s) to specific evolutionary processes. When distinct processes are capable of similar phenotypic signatures, however, identifying these drivers is difficult. We explored ecomorphological evolution across a radiation of ground‐dwelling squirrels whose history...
According to the Red Queen hypothesis, clonal diversity in asexual populations could be maintained by negative frequency‐dependant selection by coevolving parasites. If common clones are selected against and rare clones gain a concomitant advantage, we expect that clonal turnover should be faster during parasite epidemics than between them. We tested this hypothesis exploring field data of the Daphnia...
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