NATURAL HERITABILITIES: CAN THEY BE RELIABLY ESTIMATED IN THE LABORATORY?

The validity of the assumption, that laboratory estimates of heritabilities will tend to overestimate natural heritabilities, due to a reduction in environmental variability and thus the phenotypic variance of traits, is examined. One hundred sixty-five field estimates of narrow sense heritabilities derived from the literature are compared with 189 estimates from laboratory studies on wild, outbred animal populations derived from the data set of Mousseau and Roff. The results indicate that 84% of field heritabilities are significantly different from zero and that for morphological, behavioral, and life-history traits there are no significant differences between laboratory and field estimates of heritability. Unexpectedly, mean heritabilities for morphological and life-history traits are actually higher in the field than in the lab. Twenty-two cases were found for which both laboratory and natural heritabilities had been estimated on the same traits. For this subset of the data, laboratory heritabilities tended to be higher than field estimates, but the difference was not significant. Also, the correlation between lab and field estimates was high (r = 0.6, P < 0.001), and the regression slope did not differ significantly from one. The major implications of this study are that laboratory estimates of heritability should generally provide reasonable estimations of both the magnitude and the significance of heritabilities in nature.