Bottleneck effects on genetic variance for courtship repertoire

Bottleneck effects on evolutionary potential in mating behavior were addressed through assays of additive genetic variances and resulting phenotypic responses to drift in the courtship repertoires of six two-pair founder-flush lines and two control populations of the housefly. A simulation addressed the complication that an estimate of the genetic variance for a courtship trait (e.g., male performance vigor or the female requirement for copulation) must involve assays against the background behavior of the mating partners. The additive "environmental" effect of the mating partner's phenotype simply dilutes the net parent-offspring covariance for a trait. However, it there is an interaction with this "environmental" component, negative parent-offspring covariances can result under conditions of high incompatibility between the population's distributions for male performance and female choice requirements, despite high levels of genetic variance. All six bottlenecked lines exhibited significant differentiation from the controls in at least one measure of the parent-offspring covariance for male performance or female choice (estimated by 50 parent-son and 50 parent-daughter covariances for 10 courtship traits per line) which translated to significant phenotypic drift. However, the average effect across traits or across lines did not yield a significant net increase in genetic variance due to bottlenecks. Concerted phenotypic differentiation due to the founder-flush event provided indirect evidence of directional dominance in a subset of traits. Furthermore, indirect evidence of genotype-environment interactions (potentially producing genotype-genotype effects) was found in the negative parent-offspring covariances predicted by the male-female interaction simulation and by the association of the magnitude of phenotypic drift with the absolute value of the parent-offspring covariance. Hence, nonadditive genetic effects on mating behavior may be important in structuring genetic variance for courtship, although most of the increases in genetic variance would be expected to reflect inbreeding depression with relatively rare situations representing the facilitation of speciation by bottlenecks.