ArticleNature communications2021
Natural selection increases female fitness by reversing the exaggeration of a male sexually selected trait.
Article in Nature communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Life History Consequences of the Prevalence of Aggressive Males Carrying Costly Weapons.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- On weapons allometry and the form of sexual selection.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Does sexual dimorphism reflect sexual antagonism? Covariation of female fitness with brothers' sexual traits and their female homologues in neriid flies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Recurrent evolution of small body size and loss of the sword ornament in Northern swordtail fish.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2024Article
- Predation affects the evolution of sex-specific longevity.Biology letters · 2024Article
- Nature-Inspired Intelligent Computing: A Comprehensive Survey.Research (Washington, D.C.) · 2024Review
- Exaggerated mandibles are correlated with enhanced foraging efficacy in male Auckland tree wētā.Biology letters · 2023Article
- Mate-guarding success depends on male investment in a butterfly.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Genomic evidence that a sexually selected trait captures genome-wide variation and facilitates the purging of genetic load.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- The stagnation paradox: the ever-improving but (more or less) stationary population fitness.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Review
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Theory shows how sexual selection can exaggerate male traits beyond naturally selected optima and also how natural selection can ultimately halt trait elaboration. Empirical evidence supports this theory, but to our knowledge, there have been no experimental evolution studies directly testing this logic, and little examination of possible associated effects on female fitness. Here we use experimental evolution of replicate populations of broad-horned flour beetles to test for effects of sex-specific predation on an exaggerated sexually selected male trait (the mandibles), while also testing for effects on female lifetime reproductive success. We find that populations subjected to male-specific predation evolve smaller sexually selected mandibles and this indirectly increases female fitness, seemingly through intersexual genetic correlations we document. Predation solely on females has no effects. Our findings support fundamental theory, but also reveal unforseen outcomes-the indirect effect on females-when natural selection targets sex-limited sexually selected characters.
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