Sexual selection in changing environments

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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.