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7 results for “exaggerated traits”
Data from: Dual function and associated costs of a highly exaggerated trait in a cichlid fish
<p><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span>Exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics are apparently costly and seem to defy natural selection. This conundrum prompted Charles Darwin to propose the theory of sexual selection. Accordingly, exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics might be ornaments on which female choice is based and/or armaments used during male-male competition. Males of many cichlid fish species, including the adaptive radiation of Nicaraguan Midas cichlids, develop a highly exaggerated nuchal hump, which is thought to be a sexually selected trait. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a series of behavioral assays in F2 hybrids obtained from crossing a species with a relatively small hump and one with an exaggerated hump. Mate-choice experiments showed a clear female preference for males with large humps. In an open-choice experiment with limited territories, couples including large humped males were more successful in acquiring these territories. Therefore, nuchal humps appear to serve dual functions as an ornament for attracting mates and as an armament for direct contest with rivals. Although being beneficial in terms of sexual selection, this trait also imposes fitness costs on males possessing disproportionally large nuchal humps since they exhibit decreased endurance and increased energetic costs when swimming. We conclude that these costs illustrate trade-offs associated with large hump size between sexual and natural selection, which causes the latter to limit further exaggeration of this spectacular male trait.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p>
Vertically inherited microbiota and environment-modifying behaviors indirectly shape the exaggeration of secondary sexual traits in the gazelle dung beetle
<p><span>Many organisms actively manipulate the environment</span><span> in ways that have the potential to feed back on their own development, a process referred to as developmental niche construction</span><span>. Yet, </span><span>the role that constructed biotic and abiotic environments play in shaping phenotypic variation and its evolution is insufficiently understood. Here, we assess whether environmental modifications made by developing dung beetles impact the environment-sensitive expression of secondary sexual traits</span><span>.</span> <span>Larval gazelle dung beetles both physically modify their ontogenetic environment and structure their biotic interactions through the vertical inheritance of microbial symbionts. By experimentally eliminating i) physical environmental modifications, and ii) the vertical inheritance of microbes, we assess the degree to which (sym)biotic and physical environmental modifications shape the exaggeration of several traits </span><span>varying in their degree and direction of sexual dimorphism. We expected the experimental reduction of a larva's ability to shape its environment to affect trait size and scaling, especially for traits that are sexually dimorphic and environmentally plastic</span><span>. </span><span>We find that compromised developmental niche construction indeed shapes sexual dimorphism in overall body size and the absolute sizes of male-limited exaggerated head horns, the strongly sexually dimorphic fore tibia length and width, as well as the weakly dimorphic elytron length and width. This suggests that ontogenetic environmental modifications affect sex-specific phenotypic variation in functional traits. However, most of these effects can be attributed to nutrition-dependent plasticity in size and non-isometric trait scaling, rather than body-size-independent effects on the developmental regulation of trait size. Our findings suggest that the reciprocal relationship between developing organisms, their symbionts, and their environment can have considerable impacts on sexual dimorphism and functional morphology. </span></p>
Data from: Dual function and associated costs of a highly exaggerated trait in a cichlid fish
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Vertically inherited microbiota and environment-modifying behaviors indirectly shape the exaggeration of secondary sexual traits in the gazelle dung beetle
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Data from: Impact of male trait exaggeration on sex-biased gene expression and genome architecture in a water strider
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Data from: Insights into the development and evolution of exaggerated traits using de novo transcriptomes of two species of horned scarab beetles
Scarab beetles exhibit an astonishing variety of rigid exo-skeletal outgrowths, known as "horns". These traits are often sexually dimorphic and vary dramatically across species in size, shape, location, and allometry with body size. In many species, the horn exhibits disproportionate growth resulting in an exaggerated allometric relationship with body size, as compared to other traits, such as wings, that grow proportionately with body size. Depending on the species, the smallest males either do not produce a horn at all, or they produce a disproportionately small horn for their body size. While the diversity of horn shapes and their behavioural ecology have been reasonably well studied, we know far less about the proximate mechanisms that regulate horn growth. Thus, using 454 pyrosequencing, we generated transcriptome profiles, during horn growth and development, in two different scarab beetle species: the Asian rhinoceros beetle, Trypoxylus dichotomus, and the dung beetle, Onthophagus nigriventris. We obtained over half a million reads for each species that were assembled into over 6,000 and 16,000 contigs respectively. We combined these data with previously published studies to look for signatures of molecular evolution. We found a small subset of genes with horn-biased expression showing evidence for recent positive selection, as is expected with sexual selection on horn size. We also found evidence of relaxed selection present in genes that demonstrated biased expression between horned and horn-less morphs, consistent with the theory of developmental decoupling of phenotypically plastic traits.
Data from: Insights into the development and evolution of exaggerated traits using de novo transcriptomes of two species of horned scarab beetles
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Allen Brain Atlas
Allen Brain Atlas is an Allen Institute collection of brain map atlases, datasets, APIs, and analysis tools covering mouse, human, and non-human primate brain resources.
Annotated Behaviour and Observability Dataset (ABODe)
ABODe is a University of Edinburgh DataShare dataset for behavior classification in group-housed mice using home-cage video, identities, bounding boxes, ground-plate positions, and annotator labels.
DANDI Archive for NWB datasets
DANDI is a BRAIN Initiative archive for publishing and sharing neurophysiology data, including electrophysiology, optophysiology, and behavioral data packaged as NWB and related standards.
International Brain Laboratory public data
The International Brain Laboratory public data releases expose standardized mouse decision-making experiments, including Neuropixels recordings, widefield calcium imaging, behavior, and session metadata accessed through the ONE API.
OpenNeuro
OpenNeuro is a free, open platform for sharing neuroimaging datasets, with public search, dataset pages, and download paths for web, S3, DataLad, and the OpenNeuro CLI.