Mate Choice Behaviour and the Evolution of Butterfly Species
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Species are the fundamental unit of biodiversity, and the evolution of new species is a fruitful area of research. In sexually reproducing organisms, reproductive isolation is considered fundamental to speciation, and the evolution of mate choice is thus an important mechanism of species origin and maintenance. In this dissertation, I focus on the butterfly genus Heliconius to elucidate how mate choice has contributed to speciation. I first simulated genomic divergence in different demographic and selective scenarios to understand whether a nonlinear increase in the highly differentiated part of the genome over time denotes the actions of selection and gene flow during speciation. This pattern, first noted among species of Heliconius, arises in a wide range of scenarios, including neutral divergence with no gene flow, while high gene flow and selection disrupt it. Next I tested mate preference of live butterflies of two species, H. cydno and H. pachinus, that regularly exchange genes. I found a preference for conspecific mates in both sexes, and thus that both sexes contribute to premating reproductive isolation. This is one of the first demonstrations of interspecific female choice in Heliconius. I further examined hybrid males' preference for both parental species and found that, contrary to theoretical predictions, preference was not correlated with two wing colour pattern elements thought to play a role in mate choice. Finally, I conducted a meta-analysis of premating isolation among Heliconius species and subspecies, finding small effects of both genetic differentiation and experimental design. The long history of research on genomics and behaviour of Heliconius butterflies continues to shed light on the role of mate choice in speciation and reveal directions for future research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".