The evolutionary genetics of acquisition and allocation in the wing dimorphic cricket, Gryllus firmus

The evolutionary trajectories of trade-offs are ultimately governed by the evolution of the underlying physiological processes of the acquisition and subsequent allocation of resources. In this study, we focused directly on acquisition and allocation as traits and estimated their genetic architecture in the trade-off between flight capability and reproduction in the cricket, Gryllus firmus. To determine the evolutionary genetics of acquisition and allocation both within and between resource environments, we performed a large-scale quantitative genetic breeding experiment in which families were split over several resource levels. Our findings were fourfold: (1) there was substantial genetic variance in acquisition and allocation, (2) contrary to the assumption of independence between acquisition and allocation, there was a significant genetic correlation between them, (3) the genetic covariance between acquisition and allocation was significantly different in the different food environments, (4) the trade-off, as measured by the genetic correlation between flight muscle mass and ovary mass, was only significant in the food restriction environments. However, when measured directly as the genetic correlation between reproductive allocation and flight allocation, we found a consistent strong negative genetic correlation, demonstrating that when allocation is measured independently of acquisition we find evidence for the trade-off.