The role of mating systems in plasticity & divergence across variable environments

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A major goal of evolutionary biology is to understand the factors that influence the development of novel traits and the divergence of populations and species - the generation of biodiversity. Traits related to mating success are often key to the success of individuals and therefore to overall patterns of adaptive evolution. But it is not well understood how evolutionary processes respond to factors that influence individual mating success when these factors vary in space and time. Different species may show distinct responses to geographic or seasonal variation in environmental or social conditions, depending on their mating ecology. Understanding such interactions between environmental variation and behavioural ecology may therefore be key to explaining differences in species distributions, divergence and invasive potential.