The evolutionary ecology of social responsiveness in a wild insect

野生昆虫社会反应的进化生态学

• 批准号: 392873478
• 负责人: Dr. Petri Niemelä, Ph.D.
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Helsingin Yliopisto
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2017-12-31 至 2020-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/392873478?language=en
• 关键词: evolutionary; ecology; social; responsiveness; wild

Acoustic communication represents one important way by which many animal species interact socially. Acoustic social interactions are often reciprocal; one individual produces a signal to which other individual then responds. However, there might be variation on how responsive individuals are on their acoustic responses towards their social neighbors. Some individuals can, for example, adjust its signals constantly according to acoustic signals of others while other individuals might be completely unresponsive. Studying social responsiveness is important since it widens our perspective on how variation in social responsiveness is evolved and maintained in the wild. Moreover, it has been recently shown that social interactions can affect the speed of evolution in ways not predicted by standard theories making social interaction important modifiers of evolution in ways not yet fully understood. Even though social interactions have far reaching ecological and evolutionary consequences, studies documenting lifetime fitness costs and benefits of social responsiveness are, nevertheless, absent for the wild. In my research project, I will use Field cricket (Gryllus campestris) to study ecology and evolution of social responsiveness in a natural population. For field crickets, acoustic signals represent the main source of information about the structure of the social environment; these sounds are used to signal competitive ability to males and attractiveness to females. Field crickets are extremely suitable study species for the proposed project because large numbers of acoustic output can be collected automatically for large numbers of individuals simultaneously. Moreover, the natural movements of individuals can readily be monitored automatically, which consequently allows for the measurement of acoustic signaling in large numbers of ecologically relevant, and variable, social contexts. In my project I aim to address the outstanding questions of i) whether individuals differ in social responsiveness ii) whether social responsiveness is under natural selection in the wild, and iii) whether individual differences in social responsiveness represent alternative reproductive tactics.

声音交流是许多动物进行社会交往的一种重要方式。声音社会互动通常是相互的；一个人发出一个信号，另一个人就会做出回应。然而，个体对社会邻居的声音反应可能会有所不同。例如，一些个体可以根据他人的声音信号不断调整自己的信号，而另一些个体可能完全没有反应。研究社会反应是很重要的，因为它拓宽了我们对社会反应的变化是如何在野外进化和维持的看法。此外，最近的研究表明，社会互动可以以标准理论无法预测的方式影响进化的速度，这使得社会互动以尚未完全理解的方式成为进化的重要调节因素。尽管社会互动具有深远的生态和进化影响，但对野生动物来说，记录社会反应的终身健康成本和益处的研究却很少。在我的研究项目中，我将使用蟋蟀（Gryllus campestris）来研究自然种群中社会反应性的生态学和进化。对蟋蟀来说，声信号代表了社会环境结构的主要信息来源；这些声音被用来表明男性的竞争能力和对女性的吸引力。蟋蟀是非常适合该项目的研究物种，因为可以同时自动收集大量个体的大量声学输出。此外，可以很容易地自动监测个体的自然运动，从而允许在大量生态相关和可变的社会环境中测量声学信号。在我的项目中，我的目标是解决以下几个突出的问题：1)个体是否在社会反应性上存在差异；2)社会反应性是否在自然选择下存在；3)社会反应性的个体差异是否代表了不同的繁殖策略。