Next week's lab-meeting will focus on a topic that is closely connected to
our coming ESF-funded workshop in August 2012 about non-ecological and non-adaptive speciation: The problem how weakly ecologically differentiated species might still coexist, in spite of being formed by sexual selection and when there are no or weak niche differences in between them.
A recent paper in Nature presents a new model that aims to solve this problem (Abstract, link and authors posted below). You can download this paper
here.
Time and place of lab-meeting as usual: "Argumentet" at 13.30, Wednesday May 16.
- Leithen K. M’Gonigle,
- Rupert Mazzucco,
- Sarah P. Otto
- & Ulf Dieckmann
- Affiliations
- Contributions
- Corresponding author
- Nature
- 484,
- 506–509
- (26 April 2012)
- doi:10.1038/nature10971
- Received
- Accepted
- Published online
Empirical data indicate that sexual preferences are critical for maintaining species boundaries1, 2, 3, 4, yet theoretical work has suggested that, on their own, they can have only a minimal role in maintaining biodiversity5, 6, 7, 8, 9. This is because long-term coexistence within overlapping ranges is thought to be unlikely in the absence of ecological differentiation9. Here we challenge this widely held view by generalizing a standard model of sexual selection to include two ubiquitous features of populations with sexual selection: spatial variation in local carrying capacity, and mate-search costs in females. We show that, when these two features are combined, sexual preferences can single-handedly maintain coexistence, even when spatial variation in local carrying capacity is so slight that it might go unnoticed empirically. This theoretical study demonstrates that sexual selection alone can promote the long-term coexistence of ecologically equivalent species with overlapping ranges, and it thus provides a novel explanation for the maintenance of species diversity.
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