ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2006
Evolutionary trade-off between weapons and testes.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2006. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 102 papers.
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102 citing papers in PubMed, 305 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Insulin-like peptide has antagonistic pleiotropic effects on male combat traits and survival traits in an armed beetle.The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Article
- Loss of Paired Weapons Leads to Larger Testes and a Lighter Load for Dispersal.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Monogamy removes constraints on reproductive tissue investment imposed by intense sexual selection.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The evolution of ageing: classic theories and emerging ideas.Biogerontology · 2024Review
- Male Reproductive Traits Display Increased Phenotypic Variation in Response to Resource Quality and Parental Provisioning in a Tropical Rainforest Dung Beetle,Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Venom trade-off shapes interspecific interactions, physiology, and reproduction.Science advances · 2024Article
- Males armed with big weapons win fights at limited cost in ant-mimicking jumping spiders.Current zoology · 2024Article
- Article
- Scent mark signal investment predicts fight dynamics in house mice.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Greater variability in rhesus macaque (Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Sexual size dimorphism and male reproductive traits vary across populations of a tropical rainforest dung beetle species (Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Electrocommunication signals and aggressive behavior vary among male morphs in an apteronotid fish, Compsaraia samueli.The Journal of experimental biology · 2022Article
- Continuous phenotypic modulation explains male horn allometry in three dung beetle species.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Large and exaggerated sexually selected weapons comprise high proportions of metabolically inexpensive exoskeleton.Biology letters · 2022Article
- Larval social cues influence testicular investment in an insect.Current zoology · 2022Article
- Comparative metabolomic analysis of polyphenic horn development in the dung beetle Onthophagus taurus.PloS one · 2022Article
- Trade-offs between foraging reward and mortality risk drive sex-specific foraging strategies in sexually dimorphic northern elephant seals.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Investment in adult reproductive tissues is affected by larval growth conditions but not by evolution under poor larval growth conditions inCurrent research in insect science · 2022Article
42 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It has long been recognized that male mating competition is responsible for the evolution of weaponry for mate acquisition. However, when females mate with more than one male, competition between males can continue after mating in the form of sperm competition. Theory predicts that males should increase their investment in sperm production as sperm competition is increased, but it assumes that males face a trade-off between sperm production and other life-history traits such as mate acquisition. Here, we use a genus of horned beetle, Onthophagus, to examine the trade-off between investment in testes required for fertilizations and investment in weapons used to obtain matings. In a within-species study, we prevented males from developing horns and found that these males grew larger and invested relatively more in testes growth than did males allowed to grow horns. Among species, there was no general relationship between the relative sizes of horns and testes. However, the allometric slope of horn size on body size was negatively associated with the allometric slope of testes size on body size. We suggest that this reflects meaningful evolutionary changes in the developmental mechanisms regulating trait growth, specifically in the degree of nutrition-dependent phenotypic plasticity versus canalization of traits. Finally, we show how this resource allocation trade-off has influenced the evolutionary diversification of weapons, revealing a rich interplay between developmental trade-offs and both pre- and postmating mechanisms of sexual competition.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.