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Biology professor publishes article based on student's research
Professor of Biology Anne Houde co-authored a paper entitled “Evolution of frequency-dependant mate choice: keeping up with fashion trends,” which is published online on the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Web site (click Proc. R. Soc. B under "Our Journals" heading).
The guppies photographs on the Web site were taken by Katie Hampton ’06 for her thesis work, which found that female guppies are more responsive to males with rare color types that to those with common or redundant colors.
When Professor Houde presented Hampton’s research at a conference in France, Finnish biologist Hanna Kokko became interested in the work. Kokko specializes in doing computer models of the evolution of behavior and modeled the evolution of mating preferences for rare males in collaboration with Professor Houde and Michael Jennions, an Australian biologist.
They found that a preference for rare male types could evolve, as they had predicted, but only to a certain point. Once too many females in the population prefer rare male types, then any rare male type automatically becomes common in the very next generation. But then in the next generation the male type that was rare previously does not have much mating success, so the gene for the preference no longer gets an advantage through successful sons.
Professor Houde asked what happens if females don’t always get to mate with the male they prefer. In this case the preference for rare types can evolve to be very common, because this limited type of preference does not automatically make a rare type become common in the next generation.
To read a copy of the article, click here .
The guppies photographs on the Web site were taken by Katie Hampton ’06 for her thesis work, which found that female guppies are more responsive to males with rare color types that to those with common or redundant colors.
When Professor Houde presented Hampton’s research at a conference in France, Finnish biologist Hanna Kokko became interested in the work. Kokko specializes in doing computer models of the evolution of behavior and modeled the evolution of mating preferences for rare males in collaboration with Professor Houde and Michael Jennions, an Australian biologist.
They found that a preference for rare male types could evolve, as they had predicted, but only to a certain point. Once too many females in the population prefer rare male types, then any rare male type automatically becomes common in the very next generation. But then in the next generation the male type that was rare previously does not have much mating success, so the gene for the preference no longer gets an advantage through successful sons.
Professor Houde asked what happens if females don’t always get to mate with the male they prefer. In this case the preference for rare types can evolve to be very common, because this limited type of preference does not automatically make a rare type become common in the next generation.
To read a copy of the article, click here .
