Social Selection in the Wild
Sensory and Behavioural Biology
Final Report Abstract
An interesting insight from our first study is that, despite detecting social selection gradients, ultimately the phenotypic change in a population will be mostly driven by natural selection, if there is no population structure for the targeted phenotypes. Thus, our paper shows that the covariance between focal and social phenotypes seems to be the limiting factor for social selection to exert any strong evolutionary effects and thereby calls for investigation of how often this covariance is present in territorial animals, and which behaviors or ecological processes are most likely to favor or limit covariances. Our first study is one of the few quantifying social selection and its contribution to total selection in the wild. To our knowledge, it is also the first to explicitly apply this approach to behavioral traits assessed over the lifetime of free ranging individuals. In our second study, we found indirect genetic effects for trappability and relative fecundity, indicating that phenotypes of individuals are shaped by the genotypes of conspecifics. However, our analyses also revealed little direct genetic effects in all traits and a large role for direct and indirect permanent environmental effects. An important implication of our results is the potential evolutionary role of social permanent environmental effects in shaping phenotypes of conspecifics. To our knowledge, our second study is one of the first to explicitly assess the contribution of indirect and direct genetic effects to phenotypic variation and evolvability in different trait types. It is also one of the few quantifying indirect genetics in wild animals by integrating the complex spatial structure of social interactions.
Publications
- (2019). Social selection acts on behavior and body mass but does not contribute to the total selection differential in Eastern chipmunks. Evolution 74 (1), 89-102
Santostefano F, Garant D, Bergeron P, Montiglio P-O, Réale D
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.13875)
