Captivity masks inbreeding effects on male mating success in butterflies

Small isolated populations are frequently genetically less diverse than core populations, resulting in higher homozygosity that can hamper their long-term survival. 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 survival, and can be critical to the success of population conservation. Because pedigrees are hard to follow in the wild, most field studies have used marker loci to establish that fitness declines with increasing homozygosity. Very few have experimentally explored the effects of inbreeding in the wild, or compared observations in the laboratory with field conditions. 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.