Abstract
Speciation is facilitated by “magic traits,” where divergent natural selection on such traits also results in assortative mating. In animal populations, diet has the potential to act as a magic trait if populations diverge in consumed food that incidentally affects mating and therefore sexual isolation. While diet‐based assortative mating has been observed in the laboratory and in natural populations, the mechanisms causing positive diet‐based assortment remain largely unknown. Here, we experimentally created divergent diets in a sexually imprinting species of mouse, Peromyscus gossypinus (the cotton mouse), to test the hypothesis that sexual imprinting on diet could be a mechanism that generates rapid and significant sexual isolation. We provided breeding pairs with novel garlic‐ or orange‐flavored water and assessed whether their offspring, exposed to these flavors in utero and in the nest before weaning, later preferred mates that consumed the same flavored water as their parents. While males showed no preference, females preferred males of their parental diet, which is predicted to yield moderate sexual isolation. Thus, our experiment demonstrates the potential for sexual imprinting on dietary cues learned in utero and/or postnatally to facilitate reproductive isolation and potentially speciation.Open Research Badges This article has earned an Open Data Badge for making publicly available the digitally‐shareable data necessary to reproduce the reported results. The data is available at https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.n1qq6v3.
Highlights
The evolution of new species is easier when a trait undergoing di‐ vergent natural selection causes assortative mating
We manipulated parental diet in P. gossypinus to test the hypothesis that diet‐based assortative mating could evolve via sexual imprinting
We found that females had a modest preference for males who fed on the same diet as those females' parents
Summary
The evolution of new species is easier when a trait undergoing di‐ vergent natural selection causes assortative mating. While the role of the gut microbiome in mating preferences has been explored (Sharon et al, 2010), other behavioral mecha‐ nisms linking diet to assortative mating, such as sexual imprinting, have not been directly studied. In threespine stickleback and Cameroon crater lake cichlid fishes, diet‐based assortative mat‐ ing appears to be partially due to active mating preferences for diet or correlated traits (Martin, 2013; Snowberg & Bolnick, 2012); how‐ ever, it is still unclear how individual fish use traits correlated with diet to select mates. Offspring might learn to prefer the diet of their parent(s) ei‐ ther directly or indirectly through correlated traits, leading to sexual isolation when mates can be selected based on diet. We present results that show sexual imprinting on diet, while modest, is possible and can lead to assortative mating
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