Abstract
How Should We Study Urban Speciation?
Highlights
Viewing cities as natural laboratories has great potential to improve our understanding of evolutionary processes
Divergent mating preferences may evolve in the absence of variation in the preferred traits, leading to a sensory-exploitation model of sexual selection and speciation (Kirkpatrick and Ryan, 1991)
Mating preferences are most likely to diverge in the presence of sexual trait divergence
Summary
Viewing cities as natural laboratories has great potential to improve our understanding of evolutionary processes. In the past two decades many studies revealed that urban individuals look, sound and behave differently than their non-urban counterparts (reviewed in Sol et al, 2013; Johnson and Munshi-South, 2017; Szulkin et al, 2020). These observations have led to the idea that urbanization can drive speciation and that cities can provide insight into the early stages of this process (Thompson et al, 2018). Speciation may even be hampered by natural and sexual selection pressures associated with urbanization (Kirkpatrick and Nuismer, 2004)
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