Consequences of combining sex‐specific traits

Venkateswaran, Vandana Revathi; Roth, Olivia; Gokhale, Chaitanya S.

doi:10.1111/evo.14204

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 111 publications

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“…Stoehr & Kokko (2006) considered immunity investment’s potential to increase mating success, yet without an explicit focus on females preferring resistant males. If females mate preferably with males resisting infection, or tolerant males simply persist longer in the mating pool (an idea akin to ‘stamina’, Kovalov & Kokko, 2022), dynamics are likely to become more complicated; parental care (Venkateswaran et al ., 2021; Wittman & Cox, 2021) and sexually transmitted disease (Keiser et al ., 2020) offer further challenges.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sex-specific immunocompetence: resistance and tolerance can both be futile but not under the same circumstances

Brenninger,

Kovalov,

Kokko

2024

Preprint

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Immunocompetence evolution can involve a ‘resistance is futile’ scenario, if parasite encounter rates are so high that high investment in resistance only marginally delays infection. Here, we investigate two understudied aspects of ‘futility’. First, immunocompetence is usefully categorized as reducing the rate of becoming infected (resistance) or reducing the negative fitness consequences of infection once it happened (tolerance). We compare the prospects of futility for resistance, tolerance, and their joint occurrence, showing that resistance futility arises with respect to parasite encounter rates, while tolerance futility arises with respect to parasite virulence. However, if the same host trait improves pleiotropically both resistance and tolerance, futility disappears altogether and immunity investment remains profitable when increasing parasite encounter rates, virulence, or both. Second, we examine how sexual selection strength impacts these findings. If one sex (typically males) is near the faster end of a fast-slow continuum of life histories, then life history patterns reflecting futility can evolve sex-specificity. The solutions often feature sexual dimorphism in immunocompetence, but not always in the direction of strong sexual selection yielding low immunity: sexual selection can select for faster and ‘sicker’ lives, but if sexual selection also causes traits that impact parasite encounter rates, the results are strongly dependent on whether futility (along any axis) plays a role.Lay SummaryIntuition suggests that investment into immunity is higher, when hosts frequently encounter parasites. While there are examples that confirm this, in other cases, hosts have been shown to abandon immune defenses under high parasite pressure. We reconcile these findings by modelling the optimal host resource allocation towards immunity under varying parasite pressure and strength of sexual selection. Our results show two axes along which immunity investments are futile and should therefore be abandoned in favor of investing into reproduction: resisting infection becomes futile under high parasite abundance, while tolerating the harmful effects of infection is not beneficial under ever increasing parasitic virulence. However, investments of organisms that are capable of both resistance and tolerance mechanisms yield fitness payoffs also when parasites are highly virulent and abundant. This work highlights the impact of parasites and immune defenses on optimal immunity investment levels in hosts, an insight which also complements theory on sex-specific immunity.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sex-specific immunocompetence: resistance and tolerance can both be futile but not under the same circumstances

Brenninger,

Kovalov,

Kokko

2024

Preprint

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“…This framework to predict the signal evolution change is applicable to crickets and cicadas, anurans, sparrows, etc. Further, the model can be expanded and developed to understand the effects of parasitism on host sex ratios [58]. The model could also be further developed to understand the evolution of multi-component auditory signals.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This framework to predict the signal evolution change applies to crickets, cicadas, anurans, sparrows, etc. Further, the model can be expanded and developed to understand the effects of parasitism on host sex ratios [57]. The model could also be further developed to understand the evolution of multi-component auditory signals, anthropogenic effects, and specifically to climate change acoustic behaviour distributions [58–60].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parasitoid pressures and silence evolution

Suswaram

Yeakel

Gokhale

2022

Preprint

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Acoustic signals used by organisms to attract mates are known to attract parasitoid flies. The parasitoid flies lay their eggs inside the host signaler eventually killing the host. We build a host-parasitoid acoustic model to investigate the effect of parasitoid flies on the signaling host's eco-evolutionary dynamics. We used field crickets as a system to build the framework of the model. We explore how the sex-ratio, as well as, the maximum progeny of the parasitoid females impacts the evolution of the acoustic signal and population density of the signaling hosts. We also explore the stability of the host populations with increase in parasitoid load. We find that up to a threshold value, an increase in parasitoid load leads to a thriving yet silent host population. This emergence of silence as an evolutionary strategy is rapid. Our results show that a drastic increase in the parasitoid load quickly pushes the signaling host population towards instability and extinction.

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“…The reproductive interactions of females and males have evolved as a consequence of the confluence of interests, but asymmetric costs borne by each sex (Venkateswaran et al, 2021). The two sexes produce different-sized gametes, invest differently over the stages of offspring development, and have correspondingly divergent life histories (e.g., Andersson, 1994;Flatt and Heyland, 2011;Lailvaux and Husak, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%