Fitness Landscapes Reveal Context-Dependent Benefits of Oviposition Choice

Abstract

Resource choice behaviour has enormous fitness consequences and can drive niche expansion. However, individual behavioural choices are often mediated by context, determined by past experience. Are such context-dependent behaviours adaptive? Using Tribolium castaneum (the red flour beetle), we demonstrate that context-dependent oviposition choice reflects distinct, context-specific local fitness peaks. Manipulating female egg allocation in a habitat containing optimal and suboptimal resource patches, we measured offspring fitness to generate fitness landscapes as a function of all possible oviposition behaviours (i.e., combinations of fecundity and resource preference). Females from different age and competition contexts exhibit distinct behaviours which optimize different fitness components that are linked in a tradeoff. With increasing age and prior exposure to competition, they produce few but fast-developing offspring that are advantageous under high resource competition. In contrast, young naive females produce many slow-developing offspring, beneficial under weak competition. Systematically mapping complete context-dependent fitness landscapes is thus critical to infer behavioural optimality and offers predictive power in novel contexts. Preprint available at - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.27.445916v1.full Citation - Vrinda Ravi Kumar, Gaurav Agavekar, Deepa Agashe; bioRxiv 2021.05.27.445916; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.05.27.445916