BIOL3044 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Elytron, Directional Selection, Overdominance
Document Summary
The idea that an improvement in one aspect of an organisms" performance or function will come with the cost of a dis-improvement in some other aspect of performance or function. These components could be thought of as subsets of reproductive success, of fecundity. Strong positive direct selection for long horn length, weaker negative direct selection for long elytra length. So far we"ve only looked at the fungus beetles from the perspective of selection through the total fitness measured in total successful matings over a breeding season. In the original research, it was broken down into various lifetime components: lifespan (viability): days lived from start of mating season. If the horns helped the males to attract mates: analysis shows that the horns really do matter when attracting a mate. This allows us to examine the mechanism of selection, to figure out why selection is acting on particular traits.
