Geographically variable mate preferences shed light on the processes maintaining inversion polymorphism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract An important question in evolution is to understand the mechanisms that maintain phenotypic diversity, despite selection that should drive homogeneity. For example, selection by predators may promote the convergence of colour patterns among defended prey, resulting in the formation of mimetic communities. However, certain aposematic species, such as the Neotropical butterfly Heliconius numata, are polymorphic. In H. numata, wing pattern polymorphism, which is associated with chromosomal inversions, may be maintained via disassortative mating preferences, thought to favour the co-occurrence of individuals with different mimicry phenotypes in Peru. To test whether environmental variation due to geography influences mate choice, here we investigate the occurrence of disassortative mating among the two coexisting forms of H. numata in French Guiana, and its potential role in the maintenance of this polymorphism. Our experimental approach demonstrates that the two forms display weak and slightly asymmetrical disassortative mate preferences. Modelling and simulations suggest that this pattern of mate preference alone is not sufficient to maintain polymorphism, and predict the loss of the choosiest form, unless this form enjoys a survival advantage. In this aposematic species, such an advantage could arise from mimicry, but further studies into the benefits of mimicry and predator generalization are needed to test this hypothesis. More importantly, our results suggest that the balance between selective forces influencing polymorphism may vary across geographical and ecological contexts, and this warrants further study.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".