The genetic variation and covariation among fitness components in Drosophila melanogaster females and males

Abstract

The results presented in this study indicate low to moderate level of heritable variation for the following fitness components in Drosophila melanogaster sampled from natural population: early and late fecundity of females, virility of males and longevity of females and males. The most striking exception from this are high additive genetic variances for preadult developmental duration in both sexes. Females exhibit significant negative genetic correlations between early and late components of fitness. In contrast to females, we did not observe any measurable correlations between components of fitness in males. Our data suggest that genetic covariance structure between fitness components differs by sex. We also observed significant negative correlations between virility of males and late components of female life history.

The evolutionary genetics of ageing and longevity

“…V A and V D significantly increase with age for mortality in male fruit flies ( Hughes & Charlesworth, 1994). Similar increases were found in V A for mortality and female fecundity in the first weeks of life ( Tucic et al ., 1988 ; Engstrom et al ., 1989 ; Promislow et al ., 1996 ; Tatar et al ., 1996 ). In addition, inbreeding depression increased with age for male mortality and mating success in D. melanogaster ( Charlesworth & Hughes, 1996) but not for fecundity in Callosobruchus chinensis ( Tanaka, 1993).…”

Laboratory evolution of host plant utilization in the bean weevil (Acanthoscelides obtectus)

“…These authors argue that changes in host use are due to changes in overall threshold for acceptage of any host, and that changes in rank order preference are not expected. Contrary to our results, 2 studies (Harrison, 1987;Prokopy et al, 1988) Although some theoretical analyses predict that genetic correlation between preference and performance could be responsible for the maintenance of genetic variation in habitat selection (Bush, 1974; but see review in Jaenike and Holt, 1991), it is well known that genetic variation in preference may exist without correlated variation in performance and vice versa (eg, Gould, 1979;Wasserman and Futuyma, 1981;Tabashnik, 1983;Futuyma and Moreno, 1988 (Courtney et al, 1989 (Tuci6 et al, 1990) and Drosophila populations (Roff and Mousseau, 1987;Tuci6 et al 1988) and which appears to contradict Fisher's (1930) (Wasserman and Futuyma, 1981) showed that a population that had been selected for female oviposition preference on a given host species displayed the same preference for this host after the selection as a population that had been maintained without choice on the same host. These findings are in agreement with our observation for the no-choice and choice Cicer lines (table I).…”

The pattern of genetic and environmental variation in relation to ageing in laying hens

“…Where genetic correlations have been calculated from pedigreed populations of Drosophila melanogaster, some estimates between early and late fecundity have been found to be negative (Rose and Charlesworth, 1981a;Tucic et al, 1988) while others have reported positive correlations (Giesel, 1986;Engstr6m et al, 1989 The mutation accumulation theory of ageing (Medawar, 1952) (1989).…”