Abstract
Fitness is an individual’s ability to survive and reproduce, and is an important concept in evolutionary biology. However, accurately measuring fitness is often difficult, and appropriate fitness surrogates need to be identified. Lifetime reproductive success, the total progeny an organism can produce in their lifetime, is thought to be a suitable proxy for fitness, but the measure of an organism’s reproductive output across a lifetime can be difficult or impossible to obtain. Here we demonstrate that the short-term measure of reproductive success across five days provides a reasonable prediction of an individual's total lifetime reproductive success in Drosophila melanogaster. However, the lifetime reproductive success of a female that has only mated once is not correlated to the lifetime reproductive success of a female that is allowed to mate multiple times, demonstrating that these measures should not serve as surrogates nor be used to make inferences about one another.
Highlights
An organism’s success in the presence of selection is defined by their fitness [1,2,3,4]
The number of offspring an individual produces over its lifetime is generally considered an acceptable estimate of fitness [2,6,11]
The measure of offspring from the initial vial is the reproductive output from one day, the measure of offspring from the first vial plus the second vial is the reproductive output after seven days, and the measure of the offspring produced from all of the vials in a female’s lifetime is the lifetime reproductive success
Summary
An organism’s success in the presence of selection is defined by their fitness [1,2,3,4]. While the idea of fitness as the production of offspring, who are in turn successful in producing offspring, is conceptually easy to understand, there has been debate as to the appropriate way to measure fitness within a laboratory setting [5,6,7] These measurements must be a phenotype that is able to be scored in a reasonable manner, yet accurately capture the essence of an organism’s fitness. In an attempt to measure fitness, studies often measure more tractable surrogates of fitness such as body size, survivability, viability, growth rate, mating success, longevity, fecundity, and fertility (e.g, [8,9,10]) Of these alternative measurements, the number of offspring an individual produces over its lifetime (lifetime reproductive success) is generally considered an acceptable estimate of fitness [2,6,11]. Using short term reproductive success as a measure of fitness can potentially be PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0116679 June 30, 2015
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