Adaptive Plasticity as a Fitness Benefit of Mate Choice.

Phenotypic plasticity and sexual selection can each promote adaptation in variable environments, but their combined influence on adaptive evolution is not well understood. We propose that sexual selection can facilitate adaptation in variable environments when individuals prefer mates that produce adaptively plastic offspring. We develop this hypothesis and review existing studies showing that diverse groups display both sexual selection and plasticity in nonsexual traits. Thus, plasticity could be a widespread but unappreciated benefit of mate choice. We describe methods and opportunities to test this hypothesis and describe how sexual selection might foster the evolution of phenotypic plasticity. Understanding this interplay between sexual selection and phenotypic plasticity might help predict which species will adapt to a rapidly changing world.

• Publication year

  2021

• Venue

  Trends in Ecology & Evolution

• Publication date

  2021-04-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.tree.2021.01.001PMID 33546877
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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