GELIFES Seminars - Caroline Nieberding

Caroline Nieberding (Université catholique de Louvain)

Let’s bring (back) ecological complexity in sexual selection studies - A case study with a phenotypically plastic butterfly

Environmental, ecologically-relevant, complexity has been removed for decades from most laboratory-based experimental studies on sexual selection. This reductionist approach is relevant and has obvious advantages. Yet, the strength, direction and shape of sexual selection are:

1. highly dependent on the environment that organisms face;
2. efine how sexual selection affects the evolution of sexual traits and of reproductive isolation in nature.

I thus argue that it is now timely to better integrate ecologically-relevant laboratory settings to the study of sexual selection. Using a butterfly that shows high phenotypic plasticity in sexually selected traits as a model species, I will illustrate the importance of bringing ecology back in the lab by showing that:

1. the results we gain from lab experiments can be opposite depending on the environmental settings used to test sexual selection (Holveck et al, 2015; Nieberding and Holveck, 2017; in review) ;
2. adding some environmental complexity can affect the lifelong expression of multiple sexual traits in surprising ways (Holveck et al, in prep);
3. climate change can worryingly lead to immediate maladaptive mate choice that may question the short-term survival of natural populations (Muller et al, in prep).

These data are for the most part unpublished and are still open to interpretation.