No evidence that relatedness or familiarity modulate male harm in wild
Drosophila melanogaster
Abstract
Sexual selection frequently promotes the evolution of aggressive
behaviours that help males compete against their rivals, but which may
harm females and hamper their fitness. Kin selection theory predicts
that optimal male-male competition levels can be reduced when
competitors are more genetically related to each other than to the
population average, contributing to resolve this sexual conflict. Work
in Drosophila melanogaster has spearheaded empirical tests of this idea,
but studies so far have been conducted in lab-adapted populations in
homogeneous rearing environments that may hamper kin recognition, and
used highly skewed sex ratios that may fail to reflect average natural
conditions. Here, we performed a fully factorial design with the aim of
exploring how rearing environment (i.e. familiarity) and relatedness
affect male-male aggression, male harassment, and overall male harm
levels in a natural population of Drosophila melanogaster, under more
natural conditions. Namely, we: a) manipulated relatedness and
familiarity so that larvae reared apart were raised in different
environments, as is common in the wild, and b) studied the effects of
relatedness and familiarity under average levels of male-male
competition in the field. We show that, contrary to previous findings,
groups of unrelated-unfamiliar males were as likely to fight with each
other and harass females than related-familiar males, and that overall
levels of male harm to females were similar across treatments. Our
results suggest that the role of kin selection in modulating sexual
conflict is yet unclear in Drosophila melanogaster, and call for further
studies that focus on natural populations and realistic socio-sexual and
ecological environments.