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大，或者如果日益激烈的性选择增加了积累有害等位基因的可能性，通过减少有效种群规模，假设性选择会导致种群灭绝。相反，性选择机制可以潜在地提高对新环境的适应性，因为最适合这些栖息地的雄性将有最大程度的条件依赖性性选择特征的表达，使繁殖成功向有利于它们的方向倾斜，从而增加种群中其他有益等位基因的比例。很少有实证研究考察了交配制度变异和性选择对种群动态的影响，也没有在城市化背景下进行研究。我们的研究将通过估计城市和农村人口的性选择的强度和方向，并通过实验测试生态因果选择因素如何调节雌性配偶选择和雄性竞争的假设，迈出解决这一空白的第一步。我们还将测试生活节奏假设，即城市和农村环境选择不同的共变健康相关特征套件。该研究计划将培养4名博士、4名硕士和至少10名学士，学习进化生态学的概念和过程，并为他们提供最先进的领域、实验室、分析和统计技术方面的专业知识和技能。

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.