Heritability of dispersal rate and other life history traits in the Glanville fritillary butterfly

Abstract

Knowing the variances and heritabilities (h 2 ) of life history traits in populations living under natural conditions is necessary for a mechanistic understanding of respective evolutionary processes. I estimated heritabilities of several life history traits, including dispersal rate, body mass, age at first reproduction, egg mass, clutch size and lifetime reproductive success, in the Glanville fritillary butterfly (Melitaea cinxia) using parent-offspring regression. Experiments were conducted under field conditions in a large population cage (32 Â 26 m). Heritability estimates ranged from zero to almost one and several were significantly different from zero. Body size for both sexes, female age at first reproduction and egg weight were all moderately to highly heritable, whereas heritabilities were low or nonexistent in clutch size and lifetime egg production. Heritability estimates for dispersal rate varied between the sexes, so that dispersal was heritable from mother to her female offspring only. This finding is consistent with previous results showing that the F1 female but not male offspring of females that naturally established new populations in the field are significantly more dispersive than butterflies in old populations.

Tracking butterfly movements with harmonic radar reveals an effect of population age on movement distance

“…A common garden mark-recapture study showed that females from isolated new populations are more dispersive than females from old populations, suggesting that the most dispersive females are likely to colonize the more isolated habitat fragments (15). This conclusion has been supported by the finding of significant heritability for dispersal in the Glanville fritillary (16). However, dispersive individuals are likely to leave isolated fragments soon, which selects locally for reduced mobility.…”

“…Intriguingly, we found a difference not only among individuals originating from the three landscapes, but also within the Finnish metapopulation, such that females from new populations achieved their longest distances at lower temperatures than old-population females. Butterflies in the new versus old local populations in the Finnish metapopulation exhibit a syndrome of phenotypic life-history (12,13,15,21) and genotypic differences (16), to which differences we can now add dissimilar temperature dependence of movement activity.…”

The evolution of the competition–dispersal trade-off affects α- and β-diversity in a heterogeneous metacommunity

“…Dispersal has a genetic basis in many species [23][24][25] and can evolve quickly under selection [26,27], suggesting that interspecific variation along a competition-dispersal tradeoff should not only be ecologically stable, but also evolutionarily stable, at the metacommunity scale. The evolution of dispersal has been considered in several theoretical studies [28,29], though mostly in single-species metapopulations, especially to explore whether dispersal is stabilized by selection around an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS), or whether it can diversify towards several strategies (evolutionary branching, EB).…”

Weight and nutrition affect pre-mRNA splicing of a muscle gene associated with performance, energetics and life history

“…On the evening of the capture, butterflies were released into a large outdoor population cage (32 mϫ26 mϫ3 m), in which the life history experiment was conducted (Hanski et al, 2006;Saastamoinen, 2007a;Saastamoinen, 2007b;Saastamoinen, 2008). A subset of females that survived to the end of the experiment (N=21 from 16 populations) was sampled for Tnt isoform composition.…”