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Captivity masks inbreeding effects on male mating success in butterflies

Nature volume 424, pages 191–194 (2003)Cite this article

Abstract

Small isolated populations are frequently genetically less diverse than core populations, resulting in higher homozygosity that can hamper their long-term survival1,2,3,4. The decrease in fitness of organisms owing to matings between relatives is well known from captive and laboratory animals. Such inbreeding can have strongly deleterious effects on life-history traits and survival5,6,7,8,9,10,11, and can be critical to the success of population conservation2,4,12. Because pedigrees are hard to follow in the wild, most field studies have used marker loci to establish that fitness declines with increasing homozygosity1,13,14. Very few have experimentally explored the effects of inbreeding in the wild15, or compared observations in the laboratory with field conditions8,9. Here, using a technique involving the transfer of marker dusts during copulation, we show that a small decrease in mating success of captive inbred male butterflies in cages is greatly accentuated in conditions with unconstrained flight. Our results have important implications for conservation and for studies of sexual selection because they show that the behaviours underlying patterns of mating can be profoundly influenced by a history of inbreeding or by any restraining experimental conditions.

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Figure 1: Mating success of inbred males relative to that of outbred males in laboratory trials.
Figure 2: Mating success of inbred and outbred males in free-flight conditions.

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Acknowledgements

We thank I. Saccheri, B. Zwaan and C. Breuker for help with the experimental design and preliminary experiments, M. Begon for providing fluorescent dusts, and N. Wurzer and M. Lavrijsen for technical help and host-plant cultivation. We are grateful to the Hortus Botanicus Leiden for access to the greenhouse. Finance and support was provided by the European Union TMR Network ‘Survival of Species in Fragmented Landscapes’ (FRAGLAND).

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  1. Mathieu Joron

    Present address: The Galton Laboratory, University College London, 4 Stephenson Way, London, NW1 2HE, UK

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  1. Institute of Biology, Leiden University, PO Box 9516, 2300 RA, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Mathieu Joron & Paul M. Brakefield

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Correspondence to Mathieu Joron or Paul M. Brakefield.

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Joron, M., Brakefield, P. Captivity masks inbreeding effects on male mating success in butterflies. Nature 424, 191–194 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature01713

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