Lab meeting on female mate choice

Posted by Katrine Lund-Hansen

I thought this week we could read a paper by one of the invited speakers at Evolution in Sweden 2016, Sergey Gavrilets. There are many papers to choose from, so I tried to pick one that should be of general interest, even though it is a quantitative genetic model. So nothing about flies this time :)

Time: May 3rd, 10:00
Where: Argumentet, Ecology Building 2nd floor
Cake: Of course!

Title: The evolution of female mate choice by sexual conflict

Abstract: Although empirical evidence has shown that many male traits have evolved via sexual selection by female mate choice, our understanding of the adaptive value of female mating preferences is still very incomplete. It has recently been suggested that female mate choice may result from females evolving resistance rather than attraction to males, but this has been disputed. Here, we develop a quantitative genetic model showing that sexual conflict over mating indeed results in the joint evolution of costly female mate choice and exaggerated male traits under a wide range of circumstances. In contrast to traditional explanations of costly female mate choice, which rely on indirect genetic benefits, our model shows that mate choice can be generated as a side–effect of females evolving to reduce the direct costs of mating.

Half-time seminar on hermaphrodites and sex chromosome evolution

Posted by Anna Nordén

Hi all,
In addition to the lab meeting tomorrow (April 26th), I will have my half-time seminar in the afternoon entitled:

"Sex Chromosome Evolution & Sexual Antagonism in Hermaphrodites"

Time and place: 14:30, Red Room, Ecology Building.

The opponent will be Dr. Helena Westerdahl, MEMEG.

Everyone is welcome!

Talk by Viktor Nilsson-Örtman on life-history theory, temperature and metabolic scaling (April 26 2016)

Next week, EXEB postdoc Viktor Nilsson-Örtman will give a talk about his PhD-research at Umeå University and his subsequent  research at Toronto University (Canada), where he has been a VR-funded postdoc in the laboratory of Locke Rowe. Although Viktor primarily studies damselfly larvae, the topic is a very general one that should be of interest to most EXEB members.

When: Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Where: "Argumentet", 2nd floor (Ecology Building)

 Beyond the log-log plot: toward a life history theory of metabolic scaling

Allometric scaling rules are common in biology, but it remains unclear to what extent they reflect fundamental biophysical constraints or natural selection. Two famous examples are the mass-scaling of metabolism (Kleiber’s law) and the temperature-scaling of biological rate traits (the Universal Temperature Dependence). One problem with studies of biological scaling is that they have been performed at the between-species level, even though natural selection can only act within species. By sampling European and North American damselflies over continental scales and performing common garden experiments within a quantitative genetic framework, my work has revealed striking - but previously unrecognized - variation in the size- and temperature-scaling of growth and metabolism at the level where natural selection can act. In addition, through common garden experiments, I have tried to understand the consequences of this variation with respect to ecological interactions, environmental variability and species’ life histories. In this talk, I will try to summarize the main findings from my recent and ongoing work on these topics.