Our new paper about learning in sexual selection and speciation is now out in TREE

Our paper in Trends in Ecology & Evolution about the role of learning in sexual selection and speciation is now online, and you can find a link to it here. Soon the reprints will hopefully come, and then you can ask Machteld Verzijden for a copy (machteld.verzijden@biol.lu.se). Hopefully, this paper will stimulate increased interest and more experimental and observational studies in this fast moving field.

Below, you will find more details about the paper. Enjoy!

The impact of learning on sexual selection and speciation

• Machteld N. Verzijden 
• Carel ten Cate, 
• Maria R. Servedio, 
• Genevieve M. Kozak, 
• Jenny W. Boughman, 
• Erik I. Svensson

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2012.05.007

Learning is widespread in nature, occurring in most animal taxa and in several different ecological contexts and, thus, might play a key role in evolutionary processes. Here, we review the accumulating empirical evidence for the involvement of learning in mate choice and the consequences for sexual selection and reproductive isolation. We distinguish two broad categories: learned mate preferences and learned traits under mate selection (such as bird song). We point out that the context of learning, namely how and when learning takes place, often makes a crucial difference to the predicted evolutionary outcome. Factors causing biases in learning and when one should expect the evolution of learning itself are also explored.

On speciation in TREE

This coming Wednesday's lab-meeting (November 23), we will discuss two recent speciation-reviews, both published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution during the last year (2011). One is by Maria Servedio et al. and is entitled: "Magic traits in speciation: "magic" but not rare?" and can be downloaded here. The other one is by Roger Butlin and a number of co-authors and is entitled: "What do we need to know about speciation?" and can be downloaded here. The latter paper does also have an online discussion attached to it, where I and several others (including Maria Servedio) commented, and you might also want to check this discussion here, as well as a recent previous post on our blog here, and on the blog of Andrew Hendry and co-workers here.

Note that Hendry's group has written a criticism of Servedio's et al's article, which you can assess through the TREE webpage (unfortunately I do not have the links here, as there is problem with the university server at the moment).

Time and place as usual: "Argumentet" at 13.00 (Wednesday November 23, 2011).

What do we need to know about speciation? Interesting TREE-review and discussion at Cell Press

Some of you might already have seen this, but I wish to draw your attention to an interesting TREE-review entitled "What do we need to know about speciation", published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, and authored by Roger Butlin and co-workers in the FroSpecs-network (an ESF-funded research network focussed on speciation research). As you know, FroSpecs funds speciation conferences, meetings and small symposia, including one in Jyväskylä (Finland) next year, and one organized by us after the ISBE-meeting in Lund in August 2012 about behaviour, adaptive and non-adaptive speciation and ecological and non-ecological speciation.

The review by Butlin et al. aims to identify the most important future questions in speciation research in the coming years, and the article is also accompanied by an online discussion, where I was invited to participate, together with several other biologists, including Mike Ritchie, Maria Servedio and Andrew Hendry, to name some of our friends and colleagues. I encourage you to follow both the discussion and read the original article. In terms of speciation discussions, I would also like to recommend an interesting (albeit long!) blog post about "magic traits" on the research blog of Andrew Hendry.

Greetings from "Speciation-meeting" in Vienna!

Together with several other colleagues from Lund, Sweden and other countries, our lab was well-represented at the first European Speciation Conference, organized by the Institute for Advanced System Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna (Austria). This three-day conference has gathered a number of researchers working on the problems of speciation, both theoretically and empirically. A list of talks from the conference can be found here.  

The first evening of the conference, we enjoyed nice Austrian food (LOTS of meat!) and good wine, and of course the company of many of our colleagues. On the picture above you can see how happy we are after tasting some great wine. From left to right you see Anna Runemark (Lund University), Fredrik Haas (currently at Oslo University), Erik Svensson (Lund University), Andrew Hendry (McGill University, Canada), Anna Qvarnström (Uppsala University) and Jörgen Ripa (Lund University).Although this time there was a Scandinavian bias at the table, we have also of course interacted and entertained ourselves with some other great colleagues, such as Maria Servedio as well as former McArthur student and legendary ecologist Mike Rosenzweig.

 Personally, I mostly enjoyed the talk by Daniel Bolnick (University of Texas at Austin), about the rarity of sympatric speciation in sticklebacks, which was somewhat heretical in a conference that has been so dominated by the "Adaptive Dynamics"-school, led by Ulf Dieckmann at IIASA, where the importance of sympatric speciation has been vastly exaggerated, in relation to its real importance in natural populations (in my personal opinion). If sympatric speciation was as common as these models of "evolutionary branching" indicate, there would essentially be a new species on every twig of a bush, which there clearly isn't. This very fact in itself suggests (at least to me) that constraints on sympatric speciation are likely to operate and be important, and that the asexual modelling approach in the adaptive dynamics school has underestimated the severity of recombination.

As a primarily empirically oriented evolutionary biologist, I see a major weakness of the Adaptive Dynamics-school in that their models are only weakly connected to empirical work and the parameters they include in their models are not as natural to estimate as the classical and well-established estimates typically  used by field evolutionary biologists that are derived from quantitative genetics (i. e. selection coefficients). In the absence of such transparent models with parameters defined in an empirically meaningful way, the jury is still out whether adaptive and sympatric speciation is really important in nature, or whether it is mainly a phenomena that gains more attention from theoreticians than it deserves from an empirical point of view of practicing naturalists and field biologists.