地球上几乎所有的生命都面临着环境的变化,了解人们将如何应对这些变化具有迫切的重要性。已知影响人口在面对环境变化时进化速度的一个因素是强烈的性选择。这通过增加对适应良好的(通常)男性的生殖偏斜来增加人口的适应能力,平均而言,最好能够竞争交配。当男性追求替代生殖策略(ART)时,这种影响可能会被破坏,一个物种中的雄性在追求交配时表现出质上不同的行为。ART是多种多样的,但是一个常见的类别是通过条件依赖的多表型表达的,适应良好的雄性激烈竞争配偶和低质量,适应性差的雄性试图通过其他方式获得交配,非攻击性行为。这里,使用基于个人的建模方法,我们考虑了ARTs对适应和进化救援的可能影响。当ART同时进行时,这意味着低质量的男性不仅参加比赛,而且还追求其他策略,适应能力降低,进化救援,种群通过适应不断变化的环境来避免灭绝,变得不太可能。这是因为ART的使用允许低质量的男性为人群提供比其他情况下更多的适应不良基因。当ART是固定的,然而,这样,低质量的男性只会使用替代策略,而不会参加比赛,我们发现相反的情况:适应发生得更快,而当环境变化时进化拯救的可能性更大。这种令人惊讶的效果是由最高质量的雄性交配成功的增加引起的,在这种情况下,这些雄性的竞争对手要少得多,这与直觉相反,追求ART的男性的存在增加了对处于最佳状态的男性的生殖偏向。
Almost all life on earth is facing environmental change, and understanding how populations will respond to these changes is of urgent importance. One factor that is known to affect the speed by which a population can evolve when faced with changes in the environment is strong sexual selection. This increases the adaptive capacity of a population by increasing reproductive skew toward well-adapted (usually) males who will, on average, be best able to compete for matings. This effect could potentially be disrupted when males pursue alternative reproductive tactics (ARTs), whereby males within a species exhibit qualitatively different behaviors in their pursuit of matings. ARTs are diverse, but one common class is those expressed through condition-dependent polyphenism such that high-quality, well-adapted males compete aggressively for mates and low-quality, poorly adapted males attempt to acquire matings via other, nonaggressive behaviors. Here, using an individual-based modeling approach, we consider the possible impacts of ARTs on adaptation and evolutionary rescue. When the ART is simultaneous, meaning that low-quality males not only engage in contests but also pursue other tactics, adaptive capacity is reduced and evolutionary rescue, where a population avoids extinction by adapting to a changing environment, becomes less likely. This is because the use of the ART allows low-quality males to contribute more maladaptive genes to the population than would happen otherwise. When the ART is fixed, however, such that low-quality males will only use the alternative tactic and do not engage in contests, we find the opposite: adaptation happens more quickly and evolutionary rescue when the environment changes is more likely. This surprising effect is caused by an increase in the mating success of the highest quality males who face many fewer competitors in this scenario-counterintuitively, the presence of males pursuing the ART increases reproductive skew toward those males in the best condition.