ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Higher rates of sex evolve during adaptation to more complex environments.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Evolutionary Simulations Reveal Role for Genomic Recombination in the Evolution of Gene Regulatory Network Complexity and Robustness.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- A nineteenth- and twentieth-century reproductive regime shift in benthic foraminifera from the Santa Barbara Basin, California.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Ecological diversification in sexual and asexual lineages.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Asexuality shapes traits in a hybrid fish.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Selection on growth rate and local adaptation drive genomic adaptation during experimental range expansions in the protist Tetrahymena thermophila.The Journal of animal ecology · 2022Article
- Parthenogenesis in Darevskia lizards: A rare outcome of common hybridization, not a common outcome of rare hybridization.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- Article
- Direct evidence of sex and a hypothesis about meiosis in Symbiodiniaceae.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Gene swamping alters evolution during range expansions in the protistBiology letters · 2020Article
- What's Genetic Variation Got to Do with It? Starvation-Induced Self-Fertilization Enhances Survival in Paramecium.Genome biology and evolution · 2020Article
- The role of hybridisation in the origin and evolutionary persistence of vertebrate parthenogens: a case study of Darevskia lizards.Heredity · 2019Article
- Incomplete influenza A virus genomes occur frequently but are readily complemented during localized viral spread.Nature communications · 2019Article
- Experimental Evolution withGenetics · 2017Review
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A leading hypothesis for the evolutionary maintenance of sexual reproduction proposes that sex is advantageous because it facilitates adaptation. Changes in the environment stimulate adaptation but not all changes are equivalent; a change may occur along one or multiple environmental dimensions. In two evolution experiments with the facultatively sexual rotifer Brachionus calyciflorus, we test how environmental complexity affects the evolution of sex by adapting replicate populations to various environments that differ from the original along one, two, or three environmental dimensions. Three different estimates of fitness (growth, lifetime reproduction, and population density) confirmed that populations adapted to their new environment. Growth measures revealed an intriguing cost of complex adaptations: populations that adapted to more complex environments lost greater amounts of fitness in the original environment. Furthermore, both experiments showed that B. calyciflorus became more sexual when adapting to a greater number of environmental dimensions. Common garden experiments confirmed that observed changes in sex were heritable. As environments in nature are inherently complex these findings help explain why sex is maintained in natural populations.
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