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1.
    
Across multicellular organisms, the costs of reproduction and self‐maintenance result in a life history trade‐off between fecundity and longevity. Queens of perennial social Hymenoptera are both highly fertile and long‐lived, and thus, this fundamental trade‐off is lacking. Whether social insect males similarly evade the fecundity/longevity trade‐off remains largely unstudied. Wingless males of the ant genus Cardiocondyla stay in their natal colonies throughout their relatively long lives and mate with multiple female sexuals. Here, we show that Cardiocondyla obscurior males that were allowed to mate with large numbers of female sexuals had a shortened life span compared to males that mated at a low frequency or virgin males. Although frequent mating negatively affects longevity, males clearly benefit from a “live fast, die young strategy” by inseminating as many female sexuals as possible at a cost to their own survival.  相似文献   

2.
    
Parasite specialization on one or a few host species leads to a reduction in the total number of available host individuals, which may decrease transmission. However, specialists are thought to be able to compensate by increased prevalence in the host population and increased success in each individual host. Here, we use variation in host breadth among a community of avian Haemosporida to investigate consequences of generalist and specialist strategies on prevalence across hosts. We show that specialist parasites are more prevalent than generalist parasites in host populations that are shared between them. Moreover, the total number of infections of generalist and specialist parasites within the study area did not vary significantly with host breadth. This suggests that specialists can infect a similar number of host individuals as generalists, thus compensating for a reduction in host availability by achieving higher prevalence in a single host species. Specialist parasites also tended to infect older hosts, whereas infections by generalists were biased towards younger hosts. We suggest that this reflects different abilities of generalists and specialists to persist in hosts following infection. Higher abundance and increased persistence in hosts suggest that specialists are more effective parasites than generalists, supporting the existence of a trade‐off between host breadth and average host use among these parasites.  相似文献   

3.
    
Sexually selected ornaments and signals are costly to maintain if they are maladaptive in nonreproductive contexts. The jumping spider Cosmophasis umbratica exhibits distinct sexual dichromatism with males displaying elaborate UV body markings that signal male quality. Female C. umbratica respond favorably to UV‐reflecting males and ignore males that have their UV masked. However, Portia labiata, a UV‐sensitive spider‐eating specialist and a natural predator of C. umbratica, is known to use UV reflectance as a cue when hunting prey. We investigated the cost of these UV signals in C. umbratica in terms of their predation risk. Under experimental conditions, three choice scenarios were presented to P. labiata individuals. Choices by P. labiata were made between male C. umbratica with and without the UV signal; a UV‐reflecting male and non‐UV‐reflecting female; and a UV‐masked male and female. The presence and absence of UV signals was manipulated using an optical filter. Portia labiata exhibited a strong bias toward UV+ individuals. These results suggest the sexually selected trait of UV reflectance increases the visibility of males to UV‐sensitive predators. The extent of this male‐specific UV signal then is potentially moderated by predation pressure. Interestingly though, P. labiata still preferred males to females irrespective of whether UV reflectance was present or not. This suggests P. labiata can switch cues when conditions to detect UV reflectance are not optimal.  相似文献   

4.
    
Although microevolution has been shown to play an important role in pairwise antagonistic species interactions, its importance in more complex communities has received little attention. Here, we used two Pseudomonas fluorescens prey bacterial strains (SBW25 and F113) and Tetrahymena thermophila protist predator to study how rapid evolution affects the structuring of predator–prey communities. Both bacterial strains coexisted in the absence of predation, and F113 was competitively excluded in the presence of both SBW25 and predator during the 24‐day experiment, an initially surprising result given that F113 was originally poorer at growing, but more resistant to predation. However, this can be explained by SBW25 evolving greater antipredatory defence with a lower growth cost than F113. These results show that rapid prey evolution can alter the structure of predator–prey communities, having different effects depending on the initial composition of the evolving community. From a more applied perspective, our results suggest that the effectiveness of biocontrol bacteria, such as F113, could be weaker in communities characterized by intense bacterial competition and protist predation.  相似文献   

5.
    
A challenge in the Bachelor's studies in Biology is to strike a balance between reducing the teaching of practical scientific experiments to what is feasible in a short time, and teaching “real” science in undergraduate laboratories for high numbers of participants. We describe a laboratory in behavioral biology, with the primary focus on the student learning. However, also the underlying scientific question and the results of the experiment, namely the behavior of the three‐spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) in a trade‐off situation during foraging, is without a doubt timely and sufficient for scientific studies on this subject, and this through the experiments conducted and data collected by the students. The students rated this laboratory well and learned at the end that social information is certainly important, but that self‐learning can be more important, and this not only in small fish, but also for the students themselves.  相似文献   

6.
    
The effect of divergent natural selection on the evolution of behavioral traits has long been a focus of behavioral ecologists. Predation, due to its ubiquity in nature and strength as a selective agent, has been considered an important environmental driver of behavior. Predation is often confounded with other environmental factors that could also play a role in behavioral evolution. For example, environments that contain predators are often more ecologically complex and “risky” (i.e., exposed and dangerous). Previous work shows that individuals from risky environments are often more bold, active, and explorative than those from low‐risk environments. To date, most comparative studies of environmentally driven behavioral divergence are limited to comparisons among populations within species that occur in divergent selective environments but neglect comparisons between species following speciation. This limits our understanding of how behavior evolves post‐speciation. The Central American live‐bearing fish genus Brachyrhaphis provides an ideal system for examining the relationship between selective environments and behavior, within and between species. Here, we test for differences in boldness between sister species B. roseni and B. terrabensis that occur in streams with and without piscivorous predators, respectively. We found that species do differ in boldness, with species that occur with predators being bolder than those that do not. Within each species, we found that sexes differed in boldness, with males being bolder than females. We also tested for a relationship between size (a surrogate for metabolic rate) and boldness, but found no size effects. Therefore, sex, not size, affects boldness. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that complex and risky environments favor individuals with more bold behavioral traits, but they are not consistent with the hypothesis that size (and therefore metabolic rate) drives divergence in boldness. Finally, our results provide evidence that behavioral trait divergence continues even after speciation is complete.  相似文献   

7.
    
The success of invasive species is tightly linked to their fitness in a putatively novel environment. While quantitative components of fitness have been studied extensively in the context of invasive species, fewer studies have looked at qualitative components of fitness, such as behavioral plasticity, and their interaction with quantitative components, despite intuitive benefits over the course of an invasion. In particular, learning is a form of behavioral plasticity that makes it possible to finely tune behavior according to environmental conditions. Learning can be crucial for survival and reproduction of introduced organisms in novel areas, for example, for detecting new predators, or finding mates or oviposition sites. Here we explored how oviposition performance evolved in relation to both fecundity and learning during an invasion, using native and introduced Drosophila subobscura populations performing an ecologically relevant task. Our results indicated that, under comparable conditions, invasive populations performed better during our oviposition task than did native populations. This was because invasive populations had higher fecundity, together with similar cognitive performance when compared to native populations, and that there was no interaction between learning and fecundity. Unexpectedly, our study did not reveal an allocation trade‐off (i.e., a negative relationship) between learning and fecundity. On the contrary, the pattern we observed was more consistent with an acquisition trade‐off, meaning that fecundity could be limited by availability of resources, unlike cognitive ability. This pattern might be the consequence of escaping natural enemies and/or competitors during the introduction. The apparent lack of evolution of learning may indicate that the introduced population did not face novel cognitive challenges in the new environment (i.e., cognitive “pre‐adaptation”). Alternatively, the evolution of learning may have been transient and therefore not detected.  相似文献   

8.
    
Alleles conferring a higher adaptive value in one environment may have a detrimental impact on fitness in another environment. Alleles conferring resistance to pesticides and drugs provide textbook examples of this trade‐off as, in addition to conferring resistance to these molecules, they frequently decrease fitness in pesticide/drug‐free environments. We show here that resistance to chlorpyrifos, an organophosphate (OP), in Chinese populations of the diamondback moth, Plutella xylostella, is conferred by two mutations of ace1 – the gene encoding the acetylcholinesterase enzyme targeted by OPs – affecting the amino acid sequence of the corresponding protein. These mutations were always linked, consistent with the segregation of a single resistance allele, ace1R, carrying both mutations, in the populations studied. We monitored the frequency of ace1R (by genotyping more than 20 000 adults) and the level of resistance (through bioassays on more than 50 000 individuals) over several generations. We found that the ace1R resistance allele was costly in the absence of insecticide and that this cost was likely recessive. This fitness costs involved a decrease in fecundity: females from resistant strains laid 20% fewer eggs, on average, than females from susceptible strains. Finally, we found that the fitness costs associated with the ace1R allele were greater at high temperatures. At least two life history traits were involved: longevity and fecundity. The relative longevity of resistant individuals was affected only at high temperatures and the relative fecundity of resistant females – which was already affected at temperatures optimal for development – decreased further at high temperatures. The implications of these findings for resistance management are discussed.  相似文献   

9.
    
Parents of many species provide multiple forms of care to their offspring. In many birds, parents often provision offspring with food and defend them from predators and/or nest‐site competitors. We tested how these two forms of parental care covary in a wild population of house sparrows (Passer domesticus). Using a behavioral reaction norm approach, we found that nestling provisioning exhibited between individual differences and positively covaried with a measure of nest defense: the propensity to attack a heterospecific nest box competitor, the European starling (Sturnis vulgaris). This result would seem to support parental investment theory and suggests that high‐provisioning parents have high‐value offspring, which they will defend more vigorously than low‐provisioning parents. In addition, we found that parents with nestlings that hatched earlier in the season and grew faster approached a model starling more frequently and tended to be more likely to strike the starling. However, we also found that although brood value explained significant variation in both nestling provisioning and nest defense, it did not eliminate the positive, between‐individual relationship between provisioning and defense. This suggests that some of the correlation between provisioning and defense is tied to individual identity and hence may be a behavioral syndrome in which differences between individuals in underlying attributes produce correlated behaviors.  相似文献   

10.
    
Due to the ephemeral nature of carcasses they grow on, necrophagous blowfly larvae should minimize the time spent on the cadaver. This could be achieved by moving to high‐temperature areas. On that basis, we theorized that larvae placed in a heterogeneous thermal environment would move to the higher temperature that speed up their development. This study was designed to (1) test the ability of necrophagous larvae to orientate in a heterogeneous thermal environment, and (2) compare the temperatures selected by the larvae of three common blowfly species: Lucilia sericata (Meigen), Calliphora vomitoria (L.) and Calliphora vicina (Robineau‐Desvoidy). For this purpose, we designed a setup we named Thermograde. It consists of a food‐supplied linear thermal gradient that allows larvae to move, feed, and grow in close‐to‐real conditions, and to choose to stay at a given temperature. For each species and replication, 80 young third instars were placed on the thermal gradient. The location of larvae was observed after 19 h, with fifteen replications per species. The larvae of each species formed aggregations that were always located at the same temperatures, which were highly species‐specific: 33.3 ± 1.52 °C for L. sericata, 29.6 ± 1.63 °C for C. vomitoria, and 22.4 ± 1.55 °C for C. vicina. According to the literature, these value allows a fast development of the larvae, but not to reach the maximum development rate. As control experiments clearly demonstrate that larval distribution was not due to differences in food quality, we hypothesized that the local temperature selection by larvae may result from a trade‐off between development quality and duration. Indeed, temperature controls not only the development rate of the larvae, but also the quality of their growth and survival rate. Finally, results raise questions regarding the way larvae moved on the gradient and located their preferential temperature.  相似文献   

11.
12.
    
Sprouting ability is highly variable among different tree species. In many cases, there are trade‐offs in carbon allocations between growth and storage in seedlings. However, this trade‐off is likely to change with growth stages from seedling to mature plant because carbon investments in reproductive activities and/or risk of disturbance also change by species and growth stage. To examine how sprouting ability and carbohydrate storage change with growth stage, we compared two tropical secondary‐forest trees, Macaranga bancana and M. gigantea, which have different ecological traits. Maximum tree size and growth rate are higher in M. gigantea. We monitored sprout growth and stored resources, including total non‐structural carbohydrate (TNC) and nitrogen in the root, among different tree sizes for 12 months following stem‐cutting treatment. Sprouting ability (total sprout mass) and TNC concentrations were significantly higher in small individuals than in larger specimens in both species. TNC concentration decreased in all size classes after stem cutting. Macaranga bancana had greater sprout survivorship than M. gigantea, which had higher sprouting ability in larger tree‐size classes. Thus, sprouting ability likely depends on root TNC concentration and tree‐size class in both Macaranga species. Higher TNC concentration and sprout survival rates in M. bancana may be related to greater carbon allocation in survival than in growth. This hypothesis is consistent with the ecological traits of M. bancana, such as its growth rate, which was lower than that of M. gigantea.  相似文献   

13.
    
Antagonistic pleiotropy (AP) is a genetic trade‐off between different fitness components. In annual plants, a trade‐off between days to flower (DTF) and reproductive capacity often determines how many individuals survive to flower in a short growing season, and also influences the seed set of survivors. We develop a model of viability and fecundity selection informed by many experiments on the yellow monkeyflower, Mimulus guttatus, but applicable to many annual species. A viability/fecundity trade‐off maintains stable polymorphism under surprisingly general conditions. We also introduce both spatial heterogeneity and temporal stochasticity in environmental parameters. Neither is necessary for polymorphism, but spatial heterogeneity allows polymorphism while also generating the often observed non‐negative correlations in fitness components.  相似文献   

14.
    
Organisms that can resist parasitic infection often have lower fitness in the absence of parasites. These costs of resistance can mediate host evolution during parasite epidemics. For example, large epidemics will select for increased host resistance. In contrast, small epidemics (or no disease) can select for increased host susceptibility when costly resistance allows more susceptible hosts to outcompete their resistant counterparts. Despite their importance for evolution in host populations, costs of resistance (which are also known as resistance trade‐offs) have mainly been examined in laboratory‐based host–parasite systems. Very few examples come from field‐collected hosts. Furthermore, little is known about how resistance trade‐offs vary across natural populations. We addressed these gaps using the freshwater crustacean Daphnia dentifera and its natural yeast parasite, Metschnikowia bicuspidata. We found a cost of resistance in two of the five populations we studied – those with the most genetic variation in resistance and the smallest epidemics in the previous year. However, yeast epidemics in the current year did not alter slopes of these trade‐offs before and after epidemics. In contrast, the no‐cost populations showed little variation in resistance, possibly because large yeast epidemics eroded that variation in the previous year. Consequently, our results demonstrate variation in costs of resistance in wild host populations. This variation has important implications for host evolution during epidemics in nature.  相似文献   

15.
    
Reproducing females can allocate energy between the production of eggs or offspring of different size or number, both of which can strongly influence fitness. The physical capacity to store developing offspring imposes constraints on maximum clutch volume, but individual females and populations can trade off whether more or fewer eggs or offspring are produced, and their relative sizes. Harsh environments are likely to select for larger egg or offspring size, and many vertebrate populations compensate for this reproductive investment through an increase in female body size. We report a different trade‐off in a frog endemic to the Tibetan Plateau, Rana kukunoris. Females living at higher altitudes (n = 11 populations, 2000–3500 m) produce larger eggs, but without a concomitant increase in female body size or clutch size. The reduced diel and seasonal activity at high altitudes may impose constraints on the maximum body size of adult frogs, by limiting the opportunity for energy accumulation. Simultaneously, producing larger eggs likely helps to increase the rate of embryonic development, causing tadpoles to hatch earlier. The gelatinous matrix surrounding eggs, more of which is produced by large females, may help buffer developing embryos from temperature fluctuations or offer protection from ultraviolet radiation. High‐altitude frogs on the Tibetan Plateau employ a reproductive strategy that favours large egg size independent of body size, which is unusual in amphibians. The harsh and unpredictable environmental conditions at high altitudes can thus impose strong and opposing selection pressures on adult and embryonic life stages, both of which can simultaneously influence fitness.  相似文献   

16.
    
Worldwide, extreme climatic events such as drought and heatwaves are associated with forest mortality. However, the precise drivers of tree mortality at individual and stand levels vary considerably, with substantial gaps in knowledge across studies in biomes and continents. In 2010–2011, a drought‐associated heatwave occurred in south‐western Australia and drove sudden and rapid forest canopy collapse. Working in the Northern Jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata) Forest, we quantified the response of key overstory (E. marginata, Corymbia calophylla) and midstory (Banksia grandis, Allocasuarina fraseriana) tree species to the extreme climate event. Using transects spanning a gradient of drought impacts (minimal (50–100 m), transitional (100–150 m) and severe (30–60 m)), tree species mortality in relation to stand characteristics (stand basal area and stem density) and edaphic factors (soil depth) was determined. We show differential mortality between the two overstory species and the two midstory species corresponding to the drought‐associated heatwave. The dominant overstory species, E. marginata, had significantly higher mortality (~19%) than C. calophylla (~7%) in the severe zone. The midstory species, B. grandis, demonstrated substantially higher mortality (~59%) than A. fraseriana (~4%) in the transitional zone. Banksia grandis exhibited a substantial shift in structure in response to the drought‐associated heatwave in relation to tree size, basal area and soil depth. This study illustrates the role of climate extremes in driving ecosystem change and highlights the critical need to identify and quantify the resulting impact to help predict future forest die‐off events and to underpin forest management and conservation.  相似文献   

17.

Aims

Dekkera bruxellensis and Pichia guilliermondii are contaminating yeasts in wine due to the production of phenolic aromas. Although the degradation pathway of cinnamic acids, precursors of these phenolic compounds has been described in D. bruxellensis, no such pathway has been described in P. guilliermondii.

Methods and Results

A molecular and physiological characterization of 14 D. bruxellensis and 15 P. guilliermondii phenol‐producing strains was carried out. Both p‐coumarate decarboxylase (CD) and vinyl reductase (VR) activities, responsible for the production of volatile phenols, were quantified and the production of 4‐vinylphenol and 4‐ethylphenol were measured. All D. bruxellensis and some P. guilliermondii strains showed the two enzymatic activities, whilst 11 of the 15 strains of this latter species showed only CD activity and did not produce 4‐EP in the assay conditions. Furthermore, PCR products obtained with degenerated primers showed a low homology with the sequence of the gene for a phenyl acrylic acid decarboxylase activity described in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

Conclusions

D. bruxellensis and P. guilliermondii may share a similar metabolic pathway for the degradation of cinnamic acids.

Significance and Impact of the Study

This is the first work that analyses the CD and VR activities in P. guilliermondii, and the results suggest that within this species, there are differences in the metabolization of cinnamic acids.  相似文献   

18.
    
Environmental temperature has important effects on the physiology and life history of ectothermic animals, including investment in the immune system and the infectious capacity of pathogens. Numerous studies have examined individual components of these complex systems, but little is known about how they integrate when animals are exposed to different temperatures. Here, we use the Indian meal moth (Plodia interpunctella) to understand how immune investment and disease resistance react and potentially trade‐off with other life‐history traits. We recorded life‐history (development time, survival, fecundity, and body size) and immunity (hemocyte counts, phenoloxidase activity) measures and tested resistance to bacterial (E. coli) and viral (Plodia interpunctella granulosis virus) infection at five temperatures (20–30°C). While development time, lifespan, and size decreased with temperature as expected, moths exhibited different reproductive strategies in response to small changes in temperature. At cooler temperatures, oviposition rates were low but tended to increase toward the end of life, whereas warmer temperatures promoted initially high oviposition rates that rapidly declined after the first few days of adult life. Although warmer temperatures were associated with strong investment in early reproduction, there was no evidence of an associated trade‐off with immune investment. Phenoloxidase activity increased most at cooler temperatures before plateauing, while hemocyte counts increased linearly with temperature. Resistance to bacterial challenge displayed a complex pattern, whereas survival after a viral challenge increased with rearing temperature. These results demonstrate that different immune system components and different pathogens can respond in distinct ways to changes in temperature. Overall, these data highlight the scope for significant changes in immunity, disease resistance, and host–parasite population dynamics to arise from small, biologically relevant changes to environmental temperature. In light of global warming, understanding these complex interactions is vital for predicting the potential impact of insect disease vectors and crop pests on public health and food security.  相似文献   

19.
    
Each of the four serotypes of mosquito‐borne dengue virus (DENV‐1‐4) comprises multiple, genetically distinct strains. Competitive displacement between strains within a serotype is a common feature of DENV epidemiology and can trigger outbreaks of dengue disease. We investigated the mechanisms underlying two sequential displacements by DENV‐3 strains in Sri Lanka that each coincided with abrupt increases in dengue haemorrhagic fever (DHF) incidence. First, the post‐DHF strain displaced the pre‐DHF strain in the 1980s. We have previously shown that post‐DHF is more infectious than pre‐DHF for the major DENV vector, Aedes aegypti. Then, the ultra‐DHF strain evolved in situ from post‐DHF and displaced its ancestor in the 2000s. We predicted that ultra‐DHF would be more infectious for Ae. aegypti than post‐DHF but found that ultra‐DHF infected a significantly lower percentage of mosquitoes than post‐DHF. We therefore hypothesized that ultra‐DHF had effected displacement by disseminating in Ae. aegypti more rapidly than post‐DHF, but this was not borne out by a time course of mosquito infection. To elucidate the mechanisms that shape these virus–vector interactions, we tested the impact of RNA interference (RNAi), the principal mosquito defence against DENV, on replication of each of the three DENV strains. Replication of all strains was similar in mosquito cells with dysfunctional RNAi, but in cells with functional RNAi, replication of pre‐DHF was significantly suppressed relative to the other two strains. Thus, differences in susceptibility to RNAi may account for the differences in mosquito infectivity between pre‐DHF and post‐DHF, but other mechanisms underlie the difference between post‐DHF and ultra‐DHF.  相似文献   

20.
    
Spatial sorting on invasion fronts drives the evolution of dispersive phenotypes, and in doing so can push phenotypes in the opposite direction to natural selection. The invasion of cane toads (Rhinella marina) through tropical Australia has accelerated over recent decades because of the accumulation of dispersal‐enhancing traits at the invasion front, driven by spatial sorting. One such trait is the length of the forelimbs: invasion‐front toads have longer arms (relative to body length) in comparison with populations 10–20 years after invasion. Such a shift likely has fitness consequences: an increase of forearm length would decrease the strength with which a male could cling to a female during amplexus and so render such a male less competitive in competition for mates, compared to short‐armed conspecifics. Our laboratory trials of attachment strength confirmed that males with relatively longer arms were easier to displace, and competition trials show higher duration of amplexus for males with shorter arms. Together with the sharp cline in limb length observed behind the invasion front, these results imply an opposition of selective forces: spatial sorting optimizes dispersal, but as this force wanes behind the invasion front, we see the primacy of natural selection reassert itself.  相似文献   

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