Sex-biased dispersal promotes adaptive parental effects

Emmanuelle Revardel,Rémy J Petit,Alain Franc

doi:10.1186/1471-2148-10-217

Abstract

BackgroundIn heterogeneous environments, sex-biased dispersal could lead to environmental adaptive parental effects, with offspring selected to perform in the same way as the parent dispersing least, because this parent is more likely to be locally adapted. We investigate this hypothesis by simulating varying levels of sex-biased dispersal in a patchy environment. The relative advantage of a strategy involving pure maternal (or paternal) inheritance is then compared with a strategy involving classical biparental inheritance in plants and in animals.ResultsWe find that the advantage of the uniparental strategy over the biparental strategy is maximal when dispersal is more strongly sex-biased and when dispersal distances of the least mobile sex are much lower than the size of the environmental patches. In plants, only maternal effects can be selected for, in contrast to animals where the evolution of either paternal or maternal effects can be favoured. Moreover, the conditions for environmental adaptive maternal effects to be selected for are more easily fulfilled in plants than in animals.ConclusionsThe study suggests that sex-biased dispersal can help predict the direction and magnitude of environmental adaptive parental effects. However, this depends on the scale of dispersal relative to that of the environment and on the existence of appropriate mechanisms of transmission of environmentally induced traits.

Highlights

In heterogeneous environments, sex-biased dispersal could lead to environmental adaptive parental effects, with offspring selected to perform in the same way as the parent dispersing least, because this parent is more likely to be locally adapted
Plant model In the plant model, when mean seed dispersal is close to or lower than the size of environmental patches, there is an advantage for a maternal mode of inheritance compared to biparental inheritance (Zm > 0, Figure 2)
Animals are expected to evolve either environmental adaptive maternal or paternal effects, depending on whether dispersal is male-biased or female-biased. Another related difference is that, for adaptive maternal effects to evolve in animals, male dispersal needs to be higher than female dispersal

Summary

Introduction

Sex-biased dispersal could lead to environmental adaptive parental effects, with offspring selected to perform in the same way as the parent dispersing least, because this parent is more likely to be locally adapted. If dispersal is sex-biased, intermediate situations arise with individuals having the parent of one sex (male or female) of local origin but not the other. This could create suitable conditions for the evolution of environmental adaptive parental effects, with offspring selected to perform like their nearest, locally adapted parent. Sex-biased dispersal could help predict the direction and magnitude of adaptive parental effects

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Discussion

Conclusion