Does plasticity enhance or dampen phenotypic parallelism? A test with three lake-stream stickleback pairs.

Parallel (and convergent) phenotypic variation is most often studied in the wild, where it is difficult to disentangle genetic vs. environmentally induced effects. As a result, the potential contributions of phenotypic plasticity to parallelism (and nonparallelism) are rarely evaluated in a formal sense. Phenotypic parallelism could be enhanced by plasticity that causes stronger parallelism across populations in the wild than would be expected from genetic differences alone. Phenotypic parallelism could be dampened if site-specific plasticity induced differences between otherwise genetically parallel populations. We used a common-garden study of three independent lake-stream stickleback population pairs to evaluate the extent to which adaptive divergence has a genetic or plastic basis, and to investigate the enhancing vs. dampening effects of plasticity on phenotypic parallelism. We found that lake-stream differences in most traits had a genetic basis, but that several traits also showed contributions from plasticity. Moreover, plasticity was much more prevalent in one watershed than in the other two. In most cases, plasticity enhanced phenotypic parallelism, whereas in a few cases, plasticity had a dampening effect. Genetic and plastic contributions to divergence seem to play a complimentary, likely adaptive, role in phenotypic parallelism of lake-stream stickleback. These findings highlight the value of formally comparing wild-caught and laboratory-reared individuals in the study of phenotypic parallelism.

Quantitative genetic inheritance of morphological divergence in a lake-stream stickleback ecotype pair: implications for reproductive isolation.

Ecological selection against hybrids between populations occupying different habitats might be an important component of reproductive isolation during the initial stages of speciation. The strength and directionality of this barrier to gene flow depends on the genetic architecture underlying divergence in ecologically relevant phenotypes. We here present line cross analyses of inheritance for two key foraging-related morphological traits involved in adaptive divergence between stickleback ecotypes residing parapatrically in lake and stream habitats within the Misty Lake watershed (Vancouver Island, Canada). One main finding is the striking genetic dominance of the lake phenotype for body depth. Selection associated with this phenotype against first- and later-generation hybrids should therefore be asymmetric, hindering introgression from the lake to the stream population but not vice versa. Another main finding is that divergence in gill raker number is inherited additively and should therefore contribute symmetrically to reproductive isolation. Our study suggests that traits involved in adaptation might contribute to reproductive isolation qualitatively differently, depending on their mode of inheritance.

Cumulative cultural dynamics and the coevolution of cultural innovation and transmission: an ESS model for panmictic and structured populations.

When individuals in a population can acquire traits through learning, each individual may express a certain number of distinct cultural traits. These traits may have been either invented by the individual himself or acquired from others in the population. Here, we develop a game theoretic model for the accumulation of cultural traits through individual and social learning. We explore how the rates of innovation, decay, and transmission of cultural traits affect the evolutionary stable (ES) levels of individual and social learning and the number of cultural traits expressed by an individual when cultural dynamics are at a steady-state. We explore the evolution of these phenotypes in both panmictic and structured population settings. Our results suggest that in panmictic populations, the ES level of learning and number of traits tend to be independent of the social transmission rate of cultural traits and is mainly affected by the innovation and decay rates. By contrast, in structured populations, where interactions occur between relatives, the ES level of learning and the number of traits per individual can be increased (relative to the panmictic case) and may then markedly depend on the transmission rate of cultural traits. This suggests that kin selection may be one additional solution to Rogers's paradox of nonadaptive culture.

Detecting population structure using STRUCTURE software: effect of background linkage disequilibrium.

STRUCTURE is the most widely used clustering software to detect population genetic structure. The last version of this software (STRUCTURE 2.1) has been enhanced recently to take into account the occurrence of linkage disequilibrium (LD) caused by admixture between populations. This last version, however, still does not consider the effects of strong background LD caused by genetic drift, and which may cause spurious results. STRUCTURE authors have, therefore, suggested a rough threshold value of the distance (1.0 cM) between two loci below which the pair of loci should not be used. Because of the sensitiveness of LD to demographic events, the distance between loci is not always a good indicator of the strength of LD. In this study, we examine the link between genomic distance and the strength of the correlation between loci (r(LD)) in a free-ranging population of mouflon (Ovis aries), and we present an empirical test of effect of r(LD) on the clustering results provided by the linkage model in STRUCTURE. We showed that a high r(LD) value increases the probability of detecting spurious clustering. We propose to use r(LD) as an index to base a decision on whether or not to use a pair of loci in a clustering analysis.

Effective size of two feral domestic cat populations (Felis catus L): effect of the mating system.

A variety of behavioural traits have substantial effects on the gene dynamics and genetic structure of local populations. The mating system is a plastic trait that varies with environmental conditions in the domestic cat (Felis catus) allowing an intraspecific comparison of the impact of this feature on genetic characteristics of the population. To assess the potential effect of the heterogenity of males' contribution to the next generation on variance effective size, we applied the ecological approach of Nunney & Elam (1994) based upon a demographic and behavioural study, and the genetic 'temporal methods' of Waples (1989) and Berthier et al. (2002) using microsatellite markers. The two cat populations studied were nearly closed, similar in size and survival parameters, but differed in their mating system. Immigration appeared extremely restricted in both cases due to environmental and social constraints. As expected, the ratio of effective size to census number (Ne/N) was higher in the promiscuous cat population (harmonic mean = 42%) than in the polygynous one (33%), when Ne was calculated from the ecological method. Only the genetic results based on Waples' estimator were consistent with the ecological results, but failed to evidence an effect of the mating system. Results based on the estimation of Berthier et al. (2002) were extremely variable, with Ne sometimes exceeding census size. Such low reliability in the genetic results should retain attention for conservation purposes.