Negative allometry of egg size among 29 species of drosophilid flies

Abstract

The body size of adults and immature stages are fundamental animal traits that influence animal physiology, ecology, and range distribution. While the importance of egg size has been acknowledged as a proxy of parental investment in animals, little work has addressed the tempo and mode of evolution of egg size and shape. Here, we present a comparative study of this trait using a phylogeny based on genome-wide markers together with measurements of egg size and adult body size from 29 drosophilid species. Our analyses revisit the allometric relationship between egg size and body size and show that egg size scales negatively with respect to adult size, even after accounting for shared evolutionary history. In other words, larger species tend to produce proportionally smaller eggs. We also detect a moderate phylogenetic signal in both egg size and egg shape, indicating that closely related species resemble each other in these traits. Model comparisons show that the evolution of egg morphology in drosophilids is best described by gradual divergence through time driven by stochastic evolutionary change. This pattern contrasts with findings from other animal groups, including birds, cephalopods, and reptiles, where alternative evolutionary models better explain trait evolution. Together, these results suggest that the evolutionary dynamics shaping egg morphology in drosophilids differ from those operating in other major lineages and underscore the importance of comparative analyses of early developmental traits across taxa.