Abstract
Sexual signal evolution may present fitness consequences for the non-signaling sex due to shared genes and altered social conditions, but this is rarely studied in natural populations. On the Hawaiian Island of Kauai, most male Teleogryllus oceanicus (Pacific field crickets) lack the ability to sing because of a novel wing mutation (flatwing) that arose and spread in <20 generations. Obligately silent flatwing males have been highly successful because they avoid detection by a deadly, acoustically-orienting parasitoid fly. Little is known about how the flatwing mutation and resulting song-less acoustic environment affects female fitness. We found that Kauai females carrying the flatwing allele invested less in reproductive tissues and experienced more instances of mating failure than normal-wing-carrying females, though total offspring production did not differ between female genotypes. Females from Oahu (HI, where the parasitoid and flatwing also occur) and Mangaia (an island in the Cook Islands which harbors neither the parasitoid nor flatwing) invested less in reproductive tissues when reared in a song-less acoustic environment. Kauai females did not exhibit this plasticity, perhaps because they have experienced nearly song-less conditions for the past ~15 years following the establishment of flatwing. We show that female T. oceanicus experience a mix of costly and beneficial effects of sexual signal loss, which should help maintain the wing polymorphism in the wild. Our results demonstrate that the non-signaling sex can experience a nuanced set of phenotypic consequences resulting from signal evolution, which can further shape dynamics of sexual signal evolution.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 1382-1390 |
Number of pages | 9 |
Journal | Journal of evolutionary biology |
Volume | 32 |
Issue number | 12 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Dec 1 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We thank Thomas Chaffee, Laura Garbe, Narmin Ghalichi, Kirstine Grab, Ryan Duffy, Adam Hartman, Jake Hjort, Emily Johnson, Henry Kunerth, Erin Schwister, Jessie Tanner, Ellen Urquhart, and Jonathan Walker for assistance with cricket colony maintenance and experimental logistics. This work was supported by a University of Minnesota Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program award to DBS, and grants from the National Science Foundation to MZ.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 European Society For Evolutionary Biology. Journal of Evolutionary Biology © 2019 European Society For Evolutionary Biology
Keywords
- female reproductive investment
- flatwing
- rapid evolution
- reproductive success
- sexual signal evolution
- sexual signal loss
- socially-induced plasticity