Selection on behaviour and life histories across generations in a natural population
Lead Research Organisation:
UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
Department Name: Biosciences
Abstract
Insects make up the vast majority of animal biodiversity and have been studied intensively in the lab, providing numerous insights into how evolution works. However, there is now a serious imbalance between what we know about evolutionary biology in the lab and what we know about how things actually work in nature. This discrepancy is a source of concern for two reasons: Firstly, laboratory situations may be misleading as they remove sources of selection that may be very important in wild populations; for instance, it may be that male crickets that sing louder get more mates in the lab but in the field this is balanced by being more likely to be eaten by birds. Secondly, we urgently need to improve our understanding of how natural populations can respond to environmental change, and for this, we need studies of insects as well as vertebrates. Four years ago we began monitoring a population of field crickets in a Spanish meadow. Over the last 2 years we have studied the population intensively, tagging every individual and recording their lives using a network of 96 video cameras. The reproductive success of every individual and the pattern of relationships across generations have been estimated using DNA fingerprinting techniques. This has already provided important insights, such as showing that males vary more than females in how many offspring they have and that the traits displayed by males that have lots of mates are different from the traits typical of males that have lots of offspring. In this project we will dramatically improve our video monitoring and our ability to determine the relationships between individuals (by using new digital camera technology and new SNP genotyping techniques). We will combine information across years about the population as a whole, how individuals are related, their life histories, behaviour and reproductive success. This comprehensive information about every individual will allow us to address our major aims of determining how much genetic variation is present and whether natural and sexual selection, which drive evolution in populations, are consistent across years or whether they vary a lot. This is important because if in some years certain types of individual do well, whereas in others, different traits are more advantageous, this will help maintain genetic variation. Such variation allows populations to adapt to environmental change, so we need to understand how much there is and how it is maintained. A related aim will be to investigate how population density affects selection, something that we can only investigate with data from a number of years. A second set of objectives relate to examining aspects of sexual selection that have been well studied in laboratories, but neglected in the wild. These include finding out whether particular males and females or particular pairs of mates tend to be more successful either because they have genes that produce offspring that are intrinsically superior to the offspring of some other pairs or because certain combinations of individuals are more genetically compatible with one another, for instance because they are not close relatives. We will address these questions by comparing the reproductive success of pairs of wild crickets and examining how they differ genetically from one another. This will also allow us to look for evidence of genes that can persist in populations even though they reduce the fitness of one sex, because they increase the fitness of the other sex, something that has been demonstrated in the lab, but little studied in the wild. We will use the comprehensive data we have on the life histories of all the crickets in our population to investigate the question of whether short lived animals such as crickets actually die of old age, or whether they just keep going until something kills them. There are very few studies of the lives of wild invertebrates so even major questions like this remain to be answered.
Organisations
Publications
Bretman A
(2011)
Fine-scale population structure, inbreeding risk and avoidance in a wild insect population.
in Molecular ecology
Fisher D
(2019)
Dynamic networks of fighting and mating in a wild cricket population
in Animal Behaviour
Fisher DN
(2016)
Wild cricket social networks show stability across generations.
in BMC evolutionary biology
Fisher DN
(2015)
Dynamics of among-individual behavioral variation over adult lifespan in a wild insect.
in Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology
Fisher DN
(2017)
Analysing animal social network dynamics: the potential of stochastic actor-oriented models.
in The Journal of animal ecology
Fisher DN
(2016)
Comparing pre- and post-copulatory mate competition using social network analysis in wild crickets.
in Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology
Fisher DN
(2015)
Behaviour in captivity predicts some aspects of natural behaviour, but not others, in a wild cricket population.
in Proceedings. Biological sciences
Harrison XA
(2018)
A brief introduction to mixed effects modelling and multi-model inference in ecology.
in PeerJ
HOPWOOD P
(2015)
Niche variation and the maintenance of variation in body size in a burying beetle
in Ecological Entomology
Hopwood PE
(2015)
Male burying beetles extend, not reduce, parental care duration when reproductive competition is high.
in Journal of evolutionary biology
Hopwood PE
(2016)
The effect of size and sex ratio experiences on reproductive competition in Nicrophorus vespilloides burying beetles in the wild.
in Journal of evolutionary biology
Makai G
(2020)
Males and females differ in how their behaviour changes with age in wild crickets
in Animal Behaviour
Pitchers W
(2014)
Evolutionary rates for multivariate traits: the role of selection and genetic variation.
in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
Rodríguez-Muñoz R
(2019)
Comparing individual and population measures of senescence across 10 years in a wild insect population.
in Evolution; international journal of organic evolution
Rodríguez-Muñoz R
(2019)
Older males attract more females but get fewer matings in a wild field cricket
in Animal Behaviour
Rodríguez-Muñoz R
(2019)
Slower senescence in a wild insect population in years with a more female-biased sex ratio.
in Proceedings. Biological sciences
Rodríguez-Muñoz R
(2023)
Local adaptation does not constrain the expression of behaviour in translocated wild crickets
in Animal Behaviour
Rodríguez-Muñoz R
(2011)
Guarding males protect females from predation in a wild insect.
in Current biology : CB
Rodríguez-Muñoz R
(2019)
Testing the effect of early-life reproductive effort on age-related decline in a wild insect.
in Evolution; international journal of organic evolution
SINCLAIR B
(2010)
Metabolic rate does not decrease with starvation in Gryllus bimaculatus when changing fuel use is taken into account
in Physiological Entomology
Tregenza T
(2022)
Environment and mate attractiveness in a wild insect.
in Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology
Tregenza T
(2021)
Evidence for genetic isolation and local adaptation in the field cricket Gryllus campestris
in Journal of Evolutionary Biology
Tyler F
(2013)
Fertilisation and early developmental barriers to hybridisation in field crickets.
in BMC evolutionary biology
Tyler F
(2013)
Multiple post-mating barriers to hybridization in field crickets
in Molecular Ecology
Tyler F
(2015)
Chemical cues mediate species recognition in field crickets
in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
Veen T
(2012)
Diverse reproductive barriers in hybridising crickets suggests extensive variation in the evolution and maintenance of isolation
in Evolutionary Ecology
Wilde J
(2023)
Signalling males increase or decrease their calling effort according to the proximity of rivals in a wild cricket
in Animal Behaviour
Description | We have made key findings in relation to discovering that behaviour that in the laboratory had been interpreted as males guarding females and coercing them to behave in a particular way to the detriment of females, in the field turned out to be beneficial to females. |
Exploitation Route | The work we have done on developing software for use in monitoring populations of animals has already resulted in our industrial collaborators (i-code systems) selling their product to at least 2 other research groups, and we are continuing to work with them to develop this. We have developed a website www.wildcrickets.org which is aimed at lay members of the public to help them follow our attempts to understand the natural world. This research has implications for how studies designed to understand behaviour are designed. We are also involved in developing video analysis software to make it fit for the purpose of monitoring tagged wild animals. |
Sectors | Education Electronics |
URL | http://www.wildcrickets.org/ |
Description | This work has yet to make an impact outisde of its original intended outcome of furthering our understanding of the living world. This is an endeavour which will have incalculable impact over the longer term. |
Description | An individual-level approach to understanding responses to climate in wild ectotherms |
Amount | £649,368 (GBP) |
Funding ID | NE/V000772/1 |
Organisation | Natural Environment Research Council |
Sector | Public |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 09/2021 |
End | 09/2024 |
Title | Actuarial and phenotypic senescence in a wild field cricket (Gryllus campestris) population in North Spain (2006 to 2016) |
Description | Data comprise monitoring records of a population of Gryllus campestris, a flightless, univoltine field cricket that lives in and around burrows excavated among the grass in a meadow in Asturias (North Spain). The area has an altitude range from around 60 to 270 metres above sea level. The data include birth and death days, age at capture, air temperature and calling activity. Data were collected from 2006 to 2016. |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2019 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
Title | Chill coma recovery times and growth rates of early instar nymphs from populations of crickets (Gryllus campestris) from Northern Spain |
Description | Understanding how species can thrive in a range of environments is a central challenge for evolutionary ecology. There is strong evidence for local adaptation along large-scale ecological clines in insects. However, potential adaptation among neighbouring populations differing in their environment has been studied much less. We used RAD-sequencing to quantify genetic divergence and clustering of ten populations of the field cricket Gryllus campestris in the Cantabrian Mountains of northern Spain, and an outgroup on the coastal plain. Our populations were chosen to represent replicate high and low altitude habitats. We identified genetic clusters that include both high and low altitude populations indicating that the two habitat types do not hold ancestrally distinct lineages. Using common-garden rearing experiments to remove environmental effects, we found evidence for differences between high and low altitude populations in physiological and life-history traits. As predicted by the local adaptation hypothesis, crickets with parents from cooler (high altitude) populations recovered from periods of extreme cooling more rapidly than those with parents from warmer (low altitude) populations. Growth rates also differed between offspring from high and low altitude populations. However, contrary to our prediction that crickets from high altitudes would grow faster, the most striking difference was that at high temperatures, growth was fastest in individuals from low altitudes. Our findings reveal that populations a few tens of kilometres apart have independently evolved adaptations to their environment. This suggests that local adaptation in a range of traits may be commonplace even in mobile invertebrates at scales of a small fraction of species' distributions. |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2021 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
URL | http://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.j9kd51ccx |
Title | Life history of a wild field cricket population (Gryllus campestris) in North Spain (2006 to 2016) |
Description | Data comprise monitoring records of a population of Gryllus campestris, a flightless, univoltine field cricket that lives in and around burrows excavated among the grass in a meadow in Asturias (North Spain). The area has an altitude range from around 60 to 270 metres above sea level. Data include basic traits, behavioural data, genotypes and pheromones. Data were collected from 2006 to 2016. |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2019 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
Title | Trade-off between reproduction and body maintenance in a wild field cricket (Gryllus campestris) population in North Spain (2006 to 2016) |
Description | Data comprise monitoring records of a population of Gryllus campestris, a flightless, univoltine field cricket that lives in and around burrows excavated among the grass in a meadow in Asturias (North Spain). The area has an altitude range from around 60 to 270 metres above sea level. The data present information on various mating-related activities of male crickets, including age, singing activity, dominance in fights, and lifespan. Data were collected from 2006 to 2016. |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2019 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
Description | Development of engagement focussed website: WildCrickets.org |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | We built and have subsequently continued to develop, a website "WildCrickets.org" providing public facing information about our project's aims, methods and outcomes. The site includes numerous videos, photographs, participatory games etc. There is a YouTube Channel "WildCrickets" associated with the site which hosts video relating to our work. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014,2015,2016,2017,2018,2019,2020,2021,2022,2023 |
URL | http://www.wildcrickets.org |