ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2017
Selective harvest focused on sexual signal traits can lead to extinction under directional environmental change.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Meta-analytic evidence that sexual selection improves population fitness.Nature communications · 2019Pooled it
- Selective Harvests of Brown Bears Associated With Increasing Skull Size and Older Age Structure.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- The ecology of ageing in wild societies: linking age structure and social behaviour.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Protection from fishing improves body growth of an exploited species.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Marine protected areas rescue a sexually selected trait in European lobster.Evolutionary applications · 2020Article
- Article
- Hunting and mountain sheep: Do current harvest practices affect horn growth?Evolutionary applications · 2019Article
- Evolution of female choice under intralocus sexual conflict and genotype-by-environment interactions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans commonly harvest animals based on their expression of secondary sexual traits such as horns or antlers. This selective harvest is thought to have little effect on harvested populations because offtake rates are low and usually only the males are targeted. These arguments do not, however, take the relationship between secondary sexual trait expression and animal condition into account: there is increasing evidence that in many cases the degree of expression of such traits is correlated with an animal's overall well-being, which is partly determined by their genetic match to the environment. Using an individual-based model, we find that when there is directional environmental change, selective harvest of males with the largest secondary sexual traits can lead to extinction in otherwise resilient populations. When harvest is not selective, the males best suited to a new environment gain the majority of matings and beneficial alleles spread rapidly. When these best-adapted males are removed, however, their beneficial alleles are lost, leading to extinction. Given the current changes happening globally, these results suggest that trophy hunting and other cases of selective harvest (such as certain types of insect collection) should be managed with extreme care whenever populations are faced with changing conditions.
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