[HELICONIUS] Heliconius colour pattern and mate choice

[Jim Mallet]

Friends,

There has just been a paper published about Heliconius cydno and H. 
pachinus.  I thought you'd find it of interest:

Marcus R. Kronforst, Laura G. Young, Durrell D. Kapan, Camille McNeely, 
Rachel J. O'Neill, and Lawrence E. Gilbert

email: mkronforst at mail.utexas.edu.

2006

Linkage of butterfly mate preference and wing color preference cue at the 
genomic location of wingless

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., USA 103: 6575-6580.

Sexual isolation is a critical form of reproductive isolation in the early 
stages of animal speciation, yet little is known about the genetic basis of 
divergent mate preferences and preference cues in young species.

Heliconius butterflies, well known for their diversity of wing color 
patterns, mate assortatively as a result of divergence in male preference 
for wing patterns.

Here we show that the specific cue used by Heliconius cydno and Heliconius 
pachinus males to recognize conspecific females is the color of patches on 
the wings.

In addition, male mate preference segregates with forewing color in 
hybrids, indicating a genetic association between the loci responsible for 
preference and preference cue.

Quantitative trait locus mapping places a preference locus coincident with 
the locus that determines forewing color, which itself is perfectly linked 
to the wing patterning candidate gene, wingless. Furthermore, 
yellow-colored males of the polymorphic race H. cydno alithea prefer to 
court yellow females, indicating that wing color and color preference are 
controlled by loci that are located in an inversion or are pleiotropic 
effects of a single locus.

Tight genetic associations between preference and preference cue, although 
rare, make divergence and speciation particularly likely because the 
effects of natural and sexual selection on one trait are transferred to the 
other, leading to the coordinated evolution of mate recognition. This 
effect of linkage on divergence is especially important in Heliconius 
because differentiation of wing color patterns in the genus has been driven 
and maintained by natural selection for Müllerian mimicry.


James Mallet
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/taxome/jim/