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Despite fundamental importance to population dynamics, mating system evolution, and conservation management, the fitness consequences of breeding patterns in natural settings are rarely directly and rigorously evaluated. We experimentally crossed Echinacea angustifolia, a widespread, perennial prairie plant undergoing radical changes in distribution and abundance due to habitat fragmentation. We quantified...
Genetic drift in small populations can increase frequency of deleterious recessives and consequently lead to inbreeding depression and population extinction. On the other hand, as homozygosity at deleterious recessives increases, they should be purged from populations more effectively by selection. Sexual selection has been postulated to strengthen selection against deleterious mutations, and should...
We model the impact of pollinator visitation rate and behavior on the short‐term evolution of population flowering phenologies determined by the distributions of flowering times within and among individual plants. Evolution of population flowering phenologies depends on the phenotypic variances and heritabilities of the within‐individual mean and variance of flowering time. In the ecological scenarios...
Theoretical and empirical comparisons of molecular diversity in selfing and outcrossing plants have primarily focused on long‐term consequences of differences in mating system (between species). However, improving our understanding of the causes of mating system evolution requires ecological and genetic studies of the early stages of mating system transition. Here, we examine nuclear and chloroplast...
Selection to avoid inbreeding is predicted to vary across species due to differences in population structure and reproductive biology. Over the past decade, there have been numerous investigations of postcopulatory inbreeding avoidance, a phenomenon that first requires discrimination of mate (or sperm) relatedness and then requires mechanisms of male ejaculate tailoring and/or cryptic female choice...
Inbreeding depression can reduce the performance of offspring produced by mating between relatives, with consequences for population dynamics and sexual‐system evolution. In flowering plants, inbreeding depression commonly acts most intensely during seed development. This predispersal component is typically estimated by comparing seed production following exclusive self‐ and cross‐pollination, but...
Theory predicts that positive heterozygosity‐fitness correlations (HFCs) arise as a consequence of inbreeding, which is often assumed to have a strong impact in small, fragmented populations. Yet according to empirical data, HFC in such populations seem highly variable and unpredictable. We here discuss two overlooked phenomena that may contribute to this variation. First, in a small population, each...
The origin and maintenance of separate sexes (dioecy) is an enduring evolutionary puzzle. Although both hermaphroditism and dioecy occur in many diverse clades, we know little about the long‐term evolutionary consequences of changing sexual system. Here we find evidence for at least 133 transitions between sexual systems in mosses, representing an almost unparalleled lability in the evolution of their...
Molecular estimates of inbreeding may be made using genetic markers such as microsatellites, however the interpretation of resulting heterozygosity‐fitness correlations (HFCs) with respect to inbreeding depression is not straightforward. We investigated the relationship between pedigree‐determined inbreeding coefficients (f) and HFCs in a closely monitored, reintroduced population of Stewart Island...
The handicap principle predicts that sexual traits are more susceptible to inbreeding depression than nonsexual traits. However, this hypothesis has received little testing and results are inconsistent. We used 11 generations of full‐sibling mating to test the effect of inbreeding on sexual and nonsexual traits in the stalk‐eyed fly Diasemopsis meigenii. Consistent with the theoretical predictions,...
Gynodioecy, the co‐occurrence of females and hermaphrodites, is often due to conflicting interactions between cytoplasmic male sterility genes and nuclear restorers. Although gynodioecy often occurs in self‐compatible species, the effect of self‐pollination, inbreeding depression, and pollen limitation acting differently on females and hermaphrodites remains poorly known in the case of nuclear‐cytoplasmic...
Inbreeding depression is a key factor influencing mating system evolution in plants, but current understanding of its relationship with selfing rate is limited by a sampling bias with few estimates for self‐incompatible species. We quantified inbreeding depression (δ) over two growing seasons in two populations of the self‐incompatible perennial herb Arabidopsis lyrata ssp. petraea in Scandinavia...
Inbreeding depression has become a central theme in evolutionary biology and is considered to be a driving force for the evolution of reproductive morphology, physiology, behavior, and mating systems. Despite the overwhelming body of empirical work on the reproductive consequences of inbreeding, relatively little is known on whether inbreeding depresses male and female fitness to the same extent....
In principle, parental relatedness, parental age, and the age of parental gametes can all influence offspring fitness through inbreeding depression and the parental effects of organismal and postmeiotic gametic senescence. However, little is known about the extent to which these factors interact and contribute to fitness variation. Here, we show that, in Drosophila melanogaster, offspring viability...
Inbreeding mating systems are uncommon because of inbreeding depression. Mating among close relatives can evolve, however, when outcrossing is constrained. Social spiders show obligatory mating among siblings. In combination with a female‐biased sex ratio, sib‐mating results in small effective populations. In such a system, high genetic homozygosity is expected, and drift may cause population divergence...
Gametophytic self‐incompatibility (GSI) is a widespread genetic system, which enables hermaphroditic plants to avoid self‐fertilization and mating with close relatives. Inbreeding depression is thought to be the major force maintaining SI; however, inbreeding depression is a dynamical variable that depends in particular on the mating system. In this article we use multilocus, individual‐based simulations...
In what types of environments should we expect to find strong inbreeding depression? Previous studies indicate that inbreeding depression, δ, is positively correlated with the stressfulness of the environment in which it is measured. However, it remains unclear why stress, per se, should increase δ. To our knowledge, only “competitive stress” has a logical connection to δ. Through competition for...
The mode of pollination is often neglected regarding the evolution of selfing. Yet the distribution of mating systems seems to depend on the mode of pollination, and pollinators are likely to interfere with selfing evolution, since they can cause strong selective pressures on floral traits. Most selfing species reduce their investment in reproduction, and display smaller flowers, with less nectar...
Extra‐pair reproduction is widely hypothesized to allow females to avoid inbreeding with related socially paired males. Consequently, numerous field studies have tested the key predictions that extra‐pair offspring are less inbred than females’ alternative within‐pair offspring, and that the probability of extra‐pair reproduction increases with a female's relatedness to her socially paired male. However,...
Inbreeding depression, the reduced fitness of offspring of related individuals, is a central theme in evolutionary biology. Inbreeding effects are influenced by the genetic makeup of a population, which is driven by any history of genetic bottlenecks and genetic drift. The Chatham Island black robin represents a case of extreme inbreeding following two severe population bottlenecks. We tested whether...
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