A novel method for estimating the strength of positive mating preference by similarity in the wild

作者：Fernandez-Meirama, Monica; Estevez, Daniel; Ng, Terence P. T.; Williams, Gray A.; Carvajal-Rodriguez, Antonio; Rolan-Alvarez, Emilio^*

来源：Ecology and Evolution, 2017, 7(9): 2883-2893.

DOI：10.1002/ece3.2835

• assortative mating
• correlation coefficient
• mate choice
• mating pairs
• scale-of-choice effect

Mating preference can be a driver of sexual selection and assortative mating and is, therefore, a key element in evolutionary dynamics. Positive mating preference by similarity is the tendency for the choosy individual to select a mate which possesses a similar variant of a trait. Such preference can be modelled using Gaussian-like mathematical functions that describe the strength of preference, but such functions cannot be applied to empirical data collected from the field. As a result, traditionally, mating preference is indirectly estimated by the degree of assortative mating using Pearson's correlation coefficient, r) in wild captured mating pairs. Unfortunately, r and similar coefficients are often biased due to the fact that different variants of a given trait are nonrandomly distributed in the wild, and pooling of mating pairs from such heterogeneous samples may lead to "false-positive" results, termed "the scale-of-choice effect" SCE). Here we provide two new estimators of mating preference C-rough and C-scaled) derived from Gaussian-like functions which can be applied to empirical data. Computer simulations demonstrated that r coefficient showed robust estimations properties of mating preference but it was severely affected by SCE, Crough showed reasonable estimation properties and it was little affected by SCE, while C-scaled showed the best properties at infinite sample sizes and it was not affected by SCE but failed at biological sample sizes. We recommend using C-rough combined with the r coefficient to infer mating preference in future empirical studies.

• 出版日期2017-5
• 单位香港大学