ArticleEvolution letters2020
Sex differences in age-to-maturation relate to sexual selection and adult sex ratios in birds.
Article in Evolution letters, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 41 citations in OpenAlex.
- Demographic causes and social consequences of adult sex ratio variation.Nature communications · 2026Article
- DIA Proteomics Reveals the Mechanism of cAMP Signaling Pathway-Mediated HPT Axis in Regulating Spermatogenesis of Hu Sheep.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Article
- Controlling for life-history traits in vertebrates reveals that effective population size does not affect mutation rate or genome size.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Variation in adult sex ratios in tetrapods is linked to sex chromosomes through mortality differences between males and females.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Lagging Brain Gene Expression Patterns of Drosophila melanogaster Young Adult Males Confound Comparisons Between Sexes.Molecular neurobiology · 2025Article
- Moderate evidence for the sex-dependent effect of poisoning on adult survival in a long-lived raptor species.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Sexual size dimorphism in mammals is associated with changes in the size of gene families related to brain development.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The evolution of sex roles: The importance of ecology and social environment.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Evolutionary trade-offs in dormancy phenology.eLife · 2024Article
- Long-term female bias in sex ratios across life stages of Harpy Eagle, a large raptor exhibiting reverse sexual size dimorphism.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Group size and mating system predict sex differences in vocal fundamental frequency in anthropoid primates.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Domestication affects sex-biased gene expression evolution in the duck.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Adult sex ratios: causes of variation and implications for animal and human societies.Communications biology · 2022Review
- A sex skew in life-history research: the problem of missing males.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Review
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Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Maturation (the age when organisms are physiologically capable of breeding) is one of the major life history traits that have pervasive implications for reproductive strategies, fitness, and population growth. Sex differences in maturation are common in nature, although the causes of such differences are not understood. Fisher and Lack proposed that delayed maturation in males is expected when males are under intense sexual selection, but their proposition has never been tested across a wide range of taxa. By using phylogenetic comparative analyses and the most comprehensive dataset to date, including 201 species from 59 avian families, we show that intense sexual selection on males (as indicated by polygamous mating and male-skewed sexual size dimorphism) correlates with delayed maturation. We also show that the adult sex ratio (ASR), an indicator of the social environment, is associated with sex-specific maturation because in species with a female-skewed ASR, males experience later maturation. Phylogenetic path analyses suggest that adult sex ratio drives interspecific changes in the intensity of sexual selection which, in turn, influences maturation. These results are robust to alternative phylogenetic hypotheses and to potential life-history confounds, and they provide the first comprehensive support of Fisher's and Lack's propositions. Importantly, our work suggests that both social environment and mate competition influence the evolution of a major life history trait, maturation.
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