Cascading indirect genetic effects in a clonal vertebrate.

Proc Biol Sci

Department of Biological Sciences, Florida State University, 319 Stadium Drive, Tallahassee, FL 32304, USA.

Published: July 2022

AI Article Synopsis

  • This study explores how individual differences in behavior arise due to indirect genetic effects (IGE) from social interactions with other genetically different individuals.
  • Using Amazon mollies, researchers found that exposure to different social partners affected levels of aggression, which persisted when these fish were moved to new groups.
  • The findings suggest that IGE can influence behaviors in other individuals, highlighting the importance of understanding these effects for predicting population responses to environmental changes.

Article Abstract

Understanding how individual differences arise and how their effects propagate through groups are fundamental issues in biology. Individual differences can arise from indirect genetic effects (IGE): genetically based variation in the conspecifics with which an individual interacts. Using a clonal species, the Amazon molly (), we test the hypothesis that IGE can propagate to influence phenotypes of the individuals that do not experience them firsthand. We tested this by exposing genetically identical Amazon mollies to conspecific social partners of different clonal lineages, and then moving these focal individuals to new social groups in which they were the only member to have experienced the IGE. We found that genetically different social environments resulted in the focal animals experiencing different levels of aggression, and that these IGE carried over into new social groups to influence the behaviour of naive individuals. These data reveal that IGE can cascade beyond the individuals that experience them. Opportunity for cascading IGE is ubiquitous, especially in species with long-distance dispersal or fission-fusion group dynamics. Cascades could amplify (or mitigate) the effects of IGE on trait variation and on evolutionary trajectories. Expansion of the IGE framework to include cascading and other types of carry-over effects will therefore improve understanding of individual variation and social evolution and allow more accurate prediction of population response to changing environments.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9277275PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.0731DOI Listing

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