Sexual selection favours good or bad genes for pathogen resistance depending on males' pathogen exposure.

ABSTRACT: Resistance to pathogens is often invoked as an indirect benefit of female choice, but experimental evidence for links between father's sexual success and offspring resistance is scarce and equivocal. Two proposed mechanisms might generate such links. Under the first, heritable resistance to diverse pathogens depends on general immunocompetence; owing to shared condition dependence, male sexual traits indicate immunocompetence independently of the male's pathogen exposure. By contrast, other hypotheses (e.g. Hamilton-Zuk) assume that sexual traits only reveal heritable resistance if the males have been exposed to the pathogen. The distinction between the two mechanisms has been neglected by experimental studies. We show that Drosophila melanogaster males that are successful in mating contes

SUBMITTER: Joye P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6532500 | biostudies-literature | 2019 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature