Male harm offsets the demographic benefits of good genes.

ABSTRACT: Sexual conflict can arise when males evolve traits that improve their mating success but in doing so harm females. By reducing female fitness, male harm can diminish offspring production in a population and even drive extinction. Current theory on harm is based on the assumption that an individual's phenotype is solely determined by its genotype. But the expression of most sexually selected traits is also influenced by variation in biological condition (condition-dependent expression), such that individuals in better condition can express more extreme phenotypes. Here, we developed demographically explicit models of sexual conflict evolution where individuals vary in their condition. Because condition-dependent expression readily evolves for traits underlying sexual conflict, we show that

SUBMITTER: Flintham EO 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10013744 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature