Sexual selection in changing environments

城市的扩张对地方和全球生物多样性产生了迅速而重大的影响。这种快速的环境变化如何影响生态进化过程，如性选择，这是种群适应能力和生存能力的基础，仍然是一个谜。如果定向选择比稳定的自然选择更强，或者如果越来越强烈的性选择通过减少有效的种群规模增加了积累有害等位基因的可能性，那么性选择被假设为驱使种群灭绝。相反，性选择的机制可能会增加对新环境的适应率，因为最适合这些栖息地的雄性将最大程度地表达依赖于条件的性选择特征，使生殖成功对它们有利，从而增加种群中替代有益等位基因的比例。很少有研究实证研究交配系统的变化和性选择对人口动态的影响，没有这样做的背景下，城市化。我们的研究将通过估计城市和农村人口中性选择的强度和方向，并通过实验测试选择的生态因果代理如何介导女性择偶和男性-男性竞争的假设，迈出解决这一空白的第一步。我们还将检验生活节奏假设，即城市和农村环境选择不同的套房协变健身相关的特质。拟议的研究将培养4名博士，4名硕士，和至少10名B.Sc.学生在进化生态学的概念和过程，并为他们提供特定的专业知识和技能，在国家的最先进的领域，实验室，分析和统计技术。

The expansion of cities has rapid and significant impacts on local and global biodiversity. How this rapid environmental change affects eco-evolutionary processes, like sexual selection, that underlie the adaptive capacity and viability of populations remains a mystery. Sexual selection is hypothesized to drive populations to extinction if directional selection is stronger than stabilizing natural selection or if increasingly intense sexual selection increases the probability of accumulating deleterious alleles via a reduction in the effective population size. In contrast, mechanisms of sexual selection can potentially increase rates of adaptation to novel environments because males most suited to these habitats will have the greatest expression of condition-dependent sexually selected traits, skewing reproductive success in their favour, and thus increasing the proportion of alternative beneficial alleles in a population. Few studies have empirically examined the effects of mating system variation and sexual selection on population dynamics and none have done so within the context of urbanization. Our research will take the first step in addressing this lacuna by estimating the strength and direction of sexual selection in urban and rural populations and experimentally testing hypotheses of how ecological causal agents of selection mediate female mate choice and male-male competition. We will also test the pace-of-life hypothesis that urban and rural environments select for different suites of covarying fitness-related traits. The proposed research will train 4 PhD, 4 M.Sc., and at least 10 B.Sc. students in the concepts and processes of evolutionary ecology and provide them with particular expertise and skills in state-of-the art field, laboratory, analytical and statistical techniques.