2025/07/04 by Lennart Winkler, Kathryn B. McNamara, Maxine Lovegrove +2 · 1 voice · 7 citations
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Medicine · #Animal Behavior and Reproduction #Biology #Computer science #Demography #Ecology #Economics #Evolution and Genetic Dynamics #Population #Resource (disambiguation) #Resource Acquisition Is Initialization #Resource allocation #Trade-off #Viral Infections and Vectors
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/evolut/qpaf139
published in Evolution 79(10), 2133-2143 (Oxford University Press)
openalex publication_date 2025/07/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Trade-offs should be ubiquitous in nature. Yet, direct trade-offs between traits essential for fitness are challenging to detect. Recent theory suggests that population-level variation in resource acquisition could play an important role in our ability to detect trade-offs. Here, we test experimentally the hypothesis that the detection of trade-offs depends on the underlying distribution of individuals with different resource acquisition in a population. Specifically, we resampled ecologically and experimentally relevant resource acquisition distributions from a population of male Australian field crickets (Teleogryllus oceanicus) subjected to a continuous range of diet manipulation. While we found evidence for trade-offs between different male fitness traits, the distribution of resource acquisition in the population had no systematic effect on the strength of these trade-offs. Interestingly, trade-offs were most pronounced between postcopulatory traits and immune function, but trade-offs involving precopulatory traits were relatively weak. Overall, our findings question the hypothesis that resource acquisition may influence our ability to detect trade-offs and instead suggest that other factors, like the hierarchical complexity of resource allocation, make detecting trade-offs so elusive.