Inheritance of female mating preference in a sympatric sibling species pair of Lake Victoria cichlids: implications for speciation

Häsler, Marcel P.; Seehausen, Ole (2005). Inheritance of female mating preference in a sympatric sibling species pair of Lake Victoria cichlids: implications for speciation. Proceedings of the Royal Society. Series B - biological sciences, 272(1560), pp. 237-245. Royal Society of London 10.1098/rspb.2004.2946

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Female mate choice has often been proposed to play an important role in cases of rapid speciation, in particular in the explosively evolved haplochromine cichlid species flocks of the Great Lakes of East Africa. Little, if anything, is known in cichlid radiations about the heritability of female mating preferences. Entirely sympatric distribution, large ecological overlap and conspicuous differences in male nuptial coloration, and female preferences for these, make the sister species Pundamilia pundamilia and P. nyererei from Lake
Victoria an ideally suited species pair to test assumptions on the genetics of mating preferences made in models of sympatric speciation. Female mate choice is necessary and sufficient to maintain reproductive isolation between these species, and it is perhaps not unlikely therefore, that female mate choice has been important during speciation. A prerequisite for this, which had remained untested in African cichlid fish, is that variation in female mating preferences is heritable. We investigated mating preferences of females of these sister species and their hybrids to test this assumption of most sympatric speciation models, and to further test the assumption of some models of sympatric speciation by sexual selection that female preference is a single-gene trait. We find that the differences in female mating preferences between the sister species are heritable, possibly with quite high heritabilities, and that few but probably more than one genetic loci contribute to this behavioural speciation trait with no apparent dominance. We discuss these results in the light of speciation models and the debate about the explosive radiation of cichlid fishes in Lake Victoria.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

08 Faculty of Science > Department of Biology > Institute of Ecology and Evolution (IEE) > Aquatic Ecology

UniBE Contributor:

Häsler, Marcel, Seehausen, Ole

Subjects:

500 Science > 570 Life sciences; biology

ISSN:

0962-8452

Publisher:

Royal Society of London

Language:

English

Submitter:

Marcel Häsler

Date Deposited:

05 Sep 2014 12:14

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 14:32

Publisher DOI:

10.1098/rspb.2004.2946

Uncontrolled Keywords:

cichlid fish, genetics of reproductive isolation, female mating preference, Lake Victoria, sexual selection, sympatric speciation

BORIS DOI:

10.7892/boris.49524

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/49524

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