Environmental, demographic, and genetic mating system variation among five geographically distinct dusky pipefish (Syngnathus floridae) populations
- 19 March 2009
- journal article
- Published by Wiley in Molecular Ecology
- Vol. 18 (7), 1476-1490
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-294x.2009.04104.x
Abstract
Genetic mating systems are expected to vary among and within populations in response to environmental and demographic factors. Despite the fact that mating system variation theoretically can have profound effects on important evolutionary processes such as sexual selection, extensive intraspecific surveys of geographical variation in mating systems are rare. We used microsatellite markers to characterize genetic mating systems of dusky pipefish, Syngnathus floridae, from five populations distributed from the mid‐Atlantic Coast to the Western Gulf of Mexico. We also measured a number of environmental and demographic variables to examine correlations between the ecological setting and mating behaviour. Our results show that dusky pipefish are polygynandrous throughout their USA distribution, but they exhibit a wide range of quantitative variation in male mating behaviour. In addition, these five populations varied substantially with respect to environmental and demographic variables, and some of these were significantly correlated with aspects of the genetic mating system. While causal relationships cannot be firmly diagnosed from this type of comparative study, our results do identify several ecological factors, such as water temperature, adult sex ratio, and seagrass biomass, which should be considered in future experimental and comparative work. Overall, this study confirms the expectation that geographical variation in mating systems is widespread and shows that the dusky pipefish is an excellent model for continued research into the factors affecting mating systems in nature.Keywords
This publication has 64 references indexed in Scilit:
- Sexual Selection in Males and FemalesScience, 2007
- Quantitative measure of sexual selection with respect to the operational sex ratio: a comparison of selection indicesProceedings Of The Royal Society B-Biological Sciences, 2006
- Why do we still use stepwise modelling in ecology and behaviour?Journal of Animal Ecology, 2006
- Lonely hearts or sex in the city? Density-dependent effects in mating systemsPhilosophical Transactions Of The Royal Society B-Biological Sciences, 2006
- locuseater and shadowboxer: programs to optimize experimental design and multiplexing strategies for genetic mark-recaptureMolecular Ecology Notes, 2005
- gerud 2.0: a computer program for the reconstruction of parental genotypes from half‐sib progeny arrays with known or unknown parentsMolecular Ecology Notes, 2005
- Geographic variation of multiple paternity in the American lobster, Homarus americanusMolecular Ecology, 2005
- Effects of forest fragmentation on male and female reproductive success in Cestrum parqui (Solanaceae)Oecologia, 2004
- Resource availability, breeding site selection, and reproductive success of red-winged blackbirdsOecologia, 1997
- Distribution of macrobenthic crustaceans associated with Thalassia, Halodule and bare sand substrataMarine Ecology Progress Series, 1984