Summary
Between Individual Variation (BIV) for four morphological characters was scored in a number of populations of the grasshoppers Phaulacridium marginale and Phaulacridium otagoense collected during the 1973 meiotic season from South Island, New Zealand. In all but one case, the variability between individuals is lower in those populations with high chiasma frequencies than in those with low chiasma frequencies. Similar results were obtained for ten populations of Ph. marginale collected from North Island in 1974. These findings suggest a possible reason why B-chromosomes are only found in ecologically central populations of Ph. marginale.
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Westerman, M. Chiasma frequency and variability of morphological characters in populations of two grasshopper species. Heredity 51, 501–506 (1983). https://doi.org/10.1038/hdy.1983.61
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/hdy.1983.61