About this item:

140 Views | 114 Downloads

Author Notes:

Patricia Adair Gowatyl: gowaty@eeb.ucla.edu o

Or Wyatt W. Anderson : wyatt@uga.edu

P.A.G., Y.-K.K., and W.W.A. designed research; P.A.G. analyzed data; Y.-K.K. supervised technicians who carried out the experiment, and entered observations into computerized records; and P.A.G. wrote the paper.

We thank Malin Ah-King; Margaret Anderson; Dan Blumstein; John Byers; Sergio Castrezana; Don Dewsbury; Lee C. Drickamer; Brant Faircloth; Mark Friedman; Greg Grether; Thierry Hoquet; Therese Markow; Steve Hubbell; Allen Moore; Sahotra Sarkar; Zuleyma Tang-Martinez; and Judy Stamps for comments and useful discussions; and Kyungsun “Sun” Kim for her work in carrying out the experiments.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Subjects:

Research Funding:

National Science Foundation Grants IBN-9631801, IBN-0911606, and IOS-1121797 each provided partial support for the study.

Keywords:

  • Science & Technology
  • Multidisciplinary Sciences
  • Science & Technology - Other Topics
  • genetic parentage
  • monogamy
  • PRINCIPLES

No evidence of sexual selection in a repetition of Bateman's classic study of Drosophila melanogaster

Tools:

Journal Title:

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Volume:

Volume 109, Number 29

Publisher:

, Pages 11740-11745

Type of Work:

Article | Final Publisher PDF

Abstract:

We are unique in reporting a repetition of Bateman [Bateman AJ (1948) Heredity (Edinb) 2:349-368] using his methods of parentage assignment, which linked sex differences in variance of reproductive success and variance in number of mates in small populations of Drosophila melanogaster. Using offspring phenotypes, we inferred who mated with whom and assigned offspring to parents. Like Bateman, we cultured adults expressing dramatic phenotypes, so that each adult was heterozygous-dominant at its unique marker locus but had only wild-type alleles at all other subjects' marker loci. Assuming no viability effects of parental markers on offspring, the frequencies of parental phenotypes in offspring follow Mendelian expectations: one-quarter will be double-mutants who inherit the dominant gene from each parent, the offspring from which Bateman counted the number of mates per breeder; half of the offspring must be single mutants inheriting the dominant gene of one parent and the wild-type allele of the other parent; and one-quarter would inherit neither of their parent's marker mutations. Here we show that inviability of double-mutant offspring biased inferences of mate number and number of offspring on which rest inferences of sex differences in fitness variances. Bateman's method overestimated subjects with zero mates, underestimated subjects with one ormore mates, and produced systematically biased estimates of offspring number by sex. Bateman's methodology mismeasured fitness variances that are the key variables of sexual selection.

Copyright information:

Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.

Export to EndNote