E&E seminar will be from Marco Gonzalez Santoro from the Richards-Zawacki lab will be presenting their research titled:
Title: The role of social learning in speciation by sexual selection
Wednesday, January 15, 2025
A219B Langley Hall
12:00 PM
After 150 years of research, the topic of speciation by sexual selection remains a frustrating endeavor, in which empirical evidence fails to meet theoretical predictions. An outstanding progress was recently achieved by showing that sexual learning at early stages of development (imprinting) facilitates mating traits divergence and the preferences for them, the initial steps of reproductive isolation. Imprinting leads females to mate with males that look like their parents (and usually themselves), promoting assortative mating, which in turn hinders gene flow between divergent phenotypes. Imprinting also leads males to compete against individuals that look like themselves, releasing rare phenotypes in a population from competition pressures, promoting traits divergence. Much less understood is the role that social learning at other life stages and by different tutors – a common process in many animals – plays in the facilitation of behavioral reproductive barriers. To fill this gap, I performed female mate choice and male territorial aggression experiments in both field conditions and a captive bred colony of the poison frog Oophaga pumilio. This species shows rapid (<10.000 YA) and dramatic divergence in a mating trait (color), yet it does not show evidence of post-zygotic reproductive isolation. If social learning is a mechanism that facilitates pre-zygotic reproductive isolation, this system would show evidence of a unique path to speciation by sexual selection even in the presence of gene flow. I will show results of two experiments that suggest that individuals' social learning can modify imprinted behavioral biases based on the individuals' social environment (i.e., the phenotypes that they interact with) both during development and after sexual maturity. Importantly, I found that both female choice and male aggression evolve in a correlated manner, suggesting that certain social environments can rapidly trigger speciation.